President Trump supported his chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday, even after her candid Vanity Fair interviews offered a startling portrait of his second White House term.
The big picture: Despite Wiles' unusually blunt descriptions of Trump, he told The New York Post that she has done a "fantastic job," and he wasn't offended by her characterization of him as having an "alcoholic's personality."
- "No, she meant that I'm — you see, I don't drink alcohol," he told the Post. "So everybody knows that — but I've often said that if I did, I'd have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It's a very possessive personality."
- Trump said he hadn't read the Vanity Fair article but claimed he heard "the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided."
State of play: The White House rushed to defend Wiles after the interview was published.
- Nearly all of Trump's Cabinet quickly issued statements of support for her, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and FBI director Kash Patel.
- White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also defended Wiles in a Tuesday afternoon appearance on Fox News, saying, "This was, unfortunately, another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief's words out of context."
- "The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House," she said.
Go deeper: 6 jarring quotes from Trump's chief of staff in Vanity Fair
