President Donald Trump famously does not drink alcohol, but one of his top White House officials said his personality calls to mind her alcoholic father.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles gave a series of 11 interviews to Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, where she offered some withering assessments of the president and his team, including her counterintuitive comparison of Trump to her father, longtime NFL broadcaster and former player Pat Summerall.
“The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned,” Whipple wrote. “Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) ‘Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,’ Wiles said.”
Trump has often cited the alcohol-related death of his brother Fred Trump Jr. from a heart attack at age 42 as the reason he never drinks, but Wiles said he shares some characteristics of a drunk.
“’Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,’” Wiles said, according to Whipple. “‘But 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 said Trump has ‘an alcoholic’s personality,’” Whipple wrote. “He ‘operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.’”
Wiles, a longtime Republican operative and staffer, first met Trump a decade ago, during his first presidential campaign.
“In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower to meet the real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate,” Whipple wrote. “The star of The Apprentice couldn’t believe he was talking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall. ‘He’s said it a million times,’ Wiles said. ‘I judge people by their genes.’ Wiles thought Trump was interesting and smart. ‘And they called me one night and said, “We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?” And I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’”
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