President Donald Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” and has engaged in legal “retribution” against his enemies since his return to office, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in a remarkably candid series of interviews with Vanity Fair published Tuesday.
Wiles said in March that she and Trump had a “loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
Around five months later, she initially denied that Trump was “on a retribution tour,” contending that he was motivated by getting “people that have done bad things” out of the government.
But she admitted, “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time.”
And she said that the administration’s attempted prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James — who helmed a business fraud case against Trump and was seen as one of his most reviled political foes — “might be the one retribution.”
The case against James on mortgage fraud-related charges was dismissed in November, after a judge ruled Trump’s pick of prosecutor was invalidly appointed. The Department of Justice has so far failed to convince subsequent grand juries to reindict her.
Wiles’ eyebrow-raising remarks came during 11 interviews with author Chris Whipple, conducted over the course of Trump’s first year back in the White House.
Wiles, who enjoys unparalleled influence and power in Trump’s orbit, mostly operates behind the scenes. But in the conversations with Whipple, she offered blunt descriptions, and occasionally criticism, of many of the administration’s highest-profile officials.
Those officials include Trump himself.
Wiles — whose father, former New York Giants kicker Pat Summerall, is described as an alcoholic and an absentee parent — said her difficult upbringing made her “a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
Trump does not drink, but he has “an alcoholic’s personality” in that he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do,” Wiles told Whipple. “Nothing, zero, nothing.”
She also spoke about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering behind some of Trump’s biggest agenda items, including his global “reciprocal” tariff policy.
The early April tariff rollout, which Trump touted as America’s “Liberation Day,” was the product of what Wiles described as a divided White House that could not agree on the policy’s impact.
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” Wiles said in an interview at the time, recalling that she urged advisers who doubted the tariff plans to get on board, but “they couldn’t get there.”
Wiles said she believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, Whipple reported. “But it’s been more painful than I expected,” she said.
Wiles pushed back on Vanity Fair’s reporting in an X post later Tuesday morning, calling it “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me 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. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” she wrote.
She added that she has been “honored” to work for Trump for nearly a decade, and declared, “None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement to CNBC, added that Wiles “has helped President Trump 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,” Leavitt said.
Whipple also reported Wiles saying that Vice President JD Vance, a onetime Trump critic who became a leading figure of the MAGA movement, had “sort of political” motivations for changing his views.
He has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” she added.
Vance, asked about the comments later Tuesday, said he only believes “in the conspiracy theories that are true.” He listed his concerns about putting masks on children during the Covid-19 pandemic, and about former President Joe Biden’s health during his time in office, as examples.
“If any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets,” Vance added.
She said Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, an author of the government-reform guidebook known as Project 2025, was “a right-wing absolute zealot.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, meanwhile, “completely whiffed” on her early handling of government records related to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles said.
Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would support declassifying files from the federal investigations of Epstein, a well-connected money manager who died in jail in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges. But the Trump administration later said it determined that no more disclosures were warranted, sparking outrage from many MAGA supporters.
Bondi, who in February gave binders with old information labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative influencers, failed to appreciate that those people were “the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said.
“First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk,” Wiles said, adding, “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
As for Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief who briefly ran Trump’s controversial government-slashing group known as DOGE, Wiles accused him of being “an avowed ketamine [user]” and “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are.”
She said that she “was initially aghast” when DOGE moved to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, which Musk has claimed was rife with fraud.
“I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she said.
“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 said. “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.”
