Administration officials have lined up to defend White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, including leaders she insulted over the course of 11 on-the-record interviews with a writer for the magazine Vanity Fair.
Wiles and her allies said the two resulting articles, published Tuesday, took her out of context and cast the team in a negative light. Joining an outpouring of supportive statements from Cabinet secretaries and White House staffers, President Donald Trump praised Wiles and attacked Vanity Fair.
“I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair — but she’s done a fantastic job,” Trump told the New York Post on Tuesday. “I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.”
Tuesday’s articles caught Wiles and her staff by surprise. Two people close to Wiles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, said she thought her conversations with the writer, Chris Whipple, were for a book, and she didn’t expect him to quote her so extensively. Other White House staff members were not aware of Wiles’s interviews with Whipple, according to the people close to Wiles and the Vanity Fair article.
The Vanity Fair article said the conversations with Wiles were on the record.
Wiles and other top advisers, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, participated in a photo shoot and interviews for the story. The people close to Wiles said staff expected the photos to be taken by Annie Leibovitz, the famed photographer who has previously documented politicians for Vanity Fair, and they did not expect long articles to accompany the pictures.
Photographer Christopher Anderson shot the images published in the articles. Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci also attended the nine-hour visit to the White House.
“We should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets,” Vance, whom Wiles was quoted as calling a “conspiracy theorist,” said Tuesday at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.”
The chief of staff said in a social media post that the articles “disregarded” what she called “significant context.”
“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles wrote.
Wiles also received support Tuesday from Donald Trump Jr. and almost every Cabinet member — including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who Wiles said “whiffed” the release of the Epstein files, and budget director Russell Vought, whom she called a “right-wing absolute zealot.”
“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “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.”
Trump has previously begrudged advisers whom he viewed as claiming too much credit or attention. In his first term, he fired chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon after he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Last year, Trump was irritated with advisers, including Wiles, who cooperated with an extensive article in the Atlantic during the campaign.
Wiles said she spoke with Trump about the article Tuesday morning and he wasn’t mad, since he relates to feeling misrepresented in the media, according to one of the people close to her.
Trump has expressed appreciation for Wiles’s tendency to keep a low profile, such as when she declined to take a bow at his election night party, nicknaming her on the spot “the ice maiden.” But he’s also complained when advisers aren’t defending him on TV. This month, Wiles gave a rare interview on the right-wing program “The Mom View,” in which she said Trump would actively campaign for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.
“Susie is someone who has stood with the president through weaponized indictments, coordinated law fare and assassination attempts,” said Danielle Alvarez, who worked with Wiles on the 2024 Trump campaign. “The fake news is going to do what the fake news is going to do. The president’s team is focused on delivering his America First agenda.”
Wiles: Trump has ‘an alcoholic’s personality’
Wiles offered an unvarnished description of her professional relationship with Trump — a relationship that she said nearly ended after she was on the receiving end of an explosive outburst from him over Florida poll numbers.
At Trump’s Miami golf club in the fall of 2016, Wiles told Vanity Fair, he berated her for more than an hour. “He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry,” she added. After the confrontation, Wiles said she told Trump: “‘If you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice.’ … Lo and behold, he called me every day.” Trump would go on to win Florida in the 2016 presidential election.
Wiles, who referred to herself as “a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” described Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” saying he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Wiles said she urged Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, but after Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated, she “sort of got on board.”
She and Trump, she said, had “a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days [of his presidential term] are over.”
In August, long after those first 90 days had passed, Wiles told Vanity Fair that she did not think Trump was on “a retribution tour” but that he believed “people that have done bad things need to get out of the government.”
“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 added.
Bondi ‘whiffed’ in handling Epstein files, Wiles says
Wiles offered candid assessments of the administration’s handling of files related to deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Wiles said, “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.
“First she gave them binders full of nothingness,” Wiles said, referring to the binders handed to conservative influencers containingpreviously released information related to the Justice Department’s investigations of Epstein. “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.”
The Justice Department referred The Post to social media posts from Bondi, Wiles and the White House when asked for comment Tuesday.
Wiles also appeared to contradict Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that former president Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s private island “supposedly 28 times.” She said “there is no evidence” those visits happened and, asked whether there was any incriminating information about Clinton in the files, Wiles said, “The president was wrong about that.”
In November, Trump called on the Justice Department to examine the relationships between Epstein and several prominent Democrats, including Clinton.
Representatives for Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump, Wiles said, is in the Epstein files, but “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane … he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever — I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”
No evidence has surfaced of wrongdoing by Trump, who has said that he had “no idea” about Epstein’s criminal behavior.
Wiles also said it was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s suggestionto interview Epstein’s former associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of aiding Epstein in his abuse of young women and girls and is serving a 20-year prison sentence. She also claimed that neither she nor Trump was consulted about Maxwell’s transferto a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, saying: “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
Musk was ‘an odd, odd duck’
Wiles called billionaire Elon Musk, who led the U.S. DOGE Service’s efforts to slash the government’s size at the start of Trump’s second term, “a complete solo actor.”
Musk, Wiles claimed, was “an avowed ketamine [user]” who slept “in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
When asked what she thought about Musk sharing a social media post about public-sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin and Mao, she told the magazine, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing” but said she had no firsthand knowledge.
Representatives for Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
After Trump fell out with Musk earlier this year, The Post reported, the president called his former ally “a big-time drug addict,” according to a person with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Musk has acknowledgedusing ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, which he says was prescribed for him to treat depression.
Vance’s pro-Trump pivot was ‘sort of political’
In her discussion with Vanity Fair, Wiles referred to Vice President JD Vance as being “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” She also sought to differentiate how Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — both seen as potential successors to Trump in 2028 — came around to supporting Trump after having opposed him.
“Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there,” Wiles said, adding that Vance’s “conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”
Vance and Wiles also offered diverging views of how the 2026 midterm elections will go.
The vice president told Vanity Fair: “I think a good midterm election for an incumbent presidency would be to lose a dozen seats in Congress and two or three seats in the Senate. … I think it will be better than that.” Wiles, on the other hand, told the magazine, “We’re going to win the midterms.”
correctionA previous version of this article incorrectly attributed to Susie Wiles a quote that said, “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” Marco Rubio said that.
Jacob Bogage and Scott Nover contributed to this report.
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