Donald Trump’s “ice maiden” and one of the most politically powerful women in the world has offered a series of candid and often damning assessments of the president’s first year back in office and the people he appointed to shape his presidency.
In interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles described the president as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” said Vice President JD Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” labeled Elon Musk an “avowed ketamine” user who lurked in Washington, D.C., like Nosferatu, and described budget director Russell Vought as a “right-wing absolute zealot."
Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the administration’s handling of investigative files surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, according to Wiles, who also appeared to admit that the president lied when he claimed Bill Clinton visited the sex offender’s private island more than two dozen times.
The appointment of Wiles, whom the president has affectionately named Susie Trump, reflected a major shift from his small group of key advisers in his first term who could restrain his basest and most violent impulses by keeping him within the guardrails of the presidency.
Trump, unmoored from those checks and balances, has this term surrounded himself with loyalists whose jobs are to facilitate Trump’s desires, not restrain them, by eliminating the guardrails altogether.
Vance appeared to admit as much in his comments to the magazine, stating that Wiles “takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint” of her predecessors, “which is that she’s a facilitator.” Her job is to “actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life,” Vance told the magazine.
Wiles has labeled the two-part story a “disingenuously framed hit piece” against her “and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she wrote Tuesday. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
In a statement to The Independent, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wiles has helped the president “achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history.”
“President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her,” she added.
Even when she was outgunned, she eventually “got on board” with the administration’s decision-making, if she objected, she said. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she told Vanity Fair. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
Trump has an ‘alcoholic’s personality’
Wiles’s later father Pat Summerall, a former NFL player and sportscaster, was an alcoholic who was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” Wiles told the magazine.
Trump – while not a drinker himself – has “an alcoholic’s personality,” added Wiles, claiming he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
‘Score settling’ and political prosecutions
Asked whether she ever told Trump that his presidency is not supposed to be a “retribution tour” as he zeroed in on his political enemies, Wiles said she had a “loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” according to Whipple.
But by August, Wiles said Trump’s “governing principle” is “I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.”
“In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me,” she told the magazine.
Since then, Trump has directed federal prosecutors to prosecute some of his most prominent critics, including former FBI director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, as he eggs on his administration to target judges, lawyers, broadcasters and ideological opponents while pardoning dozens of allies.
Asked whether she ever asked the president to rethink pardoning hundreds of people connected to the January 6 attack, Willies said she “did exactly that.”
“I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent,” she told Whipple. “And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’”
‘Avowed ketamine’ user Elon Musk and USAID cuts
Elon Musk, who blitzed through federal agencies with a “wood chipper” to cut billions of dollars in government spending and fire thousand of workers, is a “complete solo actor” and an “avowed ketamine” user who slept in a sleeping bag in a building near the White House during the daytime, Wiles told the magazine.
Whipple wrote that Wiles had described him as something like a “jacked-up Nosferatu.”
Musk is “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are,” according to Wiles. “You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
She was “initially aghast” at the Musk-led evisceration of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has cost thousands of lives in Africa and imperiled hundreds of life-saving missions across the globe.
“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles told Whipple. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Pam Bondi ‘whiffed’ Epstein
Wiles dismissed suggestions that Trump did anything wrong during his yearslong relationship with Epstein while admitting that he is in the so-called Epstein files and on his plane manifests. “They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever — I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together,” she said.
But Bondi, who in February gave a group of far-right influencers binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” that contained already-publicly available information about the late financier accused of abusing dozens of young women and girls, had “completely whiffed” the administration’s handling of the case.
“First she gave them binders full of nothingness,” Wiles told the magazine “And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
She also said it was Todd Blanche — Trump’s former criminal defense attorney who is now Bondi's deputy — who suggested interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. That interview appeared designed to suppress criticism surrounding a decision from the Department of Justice that “no further disclosure” in the Epstein case “would be appropriate or warranted.”
Neither she nor Trump were consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit, according to Wiles. “The president was ticked,” she said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
‘Mistakes’ in ICE arrests and mass deportations
Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her deputies have been uncompromising in their defense of mass deportations and implementing the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
But in the aftermath of Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly send planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador, launching a series of high-profile legal battles, Wiles told Vanity Fair that “we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation.”
“If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever,” she told the magazine.
“But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check,” she added.
Following a wave of stories of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection Agents hauling away immigrants and lawful residents who show up for their hearings and appointments, Wiles said: “I can’t understand how you make that mistake.”
Trump was ‘thinking out loud’ with chaotic tariff agenda
There was a “huge disagreement” over Trump’s rollout of sweeping tariffs on global trading partners, an idea borne out of “thinking out loud is what I would call it,” according to Wiles.
With Vance’s help, they told Trump “hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today” and “let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it” — none of which landed with the president, she told the magazine.
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