There is a Santa Claus. There is light amid the darkness. Vanity Fair’s two–part chronicle of interviews with Susie Wiles, President Trump’s heretofore tight-lipped and uber-credible White House chief of staff, is a Christmas and Hanukkah gift to the nation in this holiday season.
By her monthly on-the-record observations to author Chris Whipple since just before Trump retook power, Wiles has put a stunningly bright bow around the first year of Trump 2.0, lit an entire menorah of revelations and confirmed, if inadvertently, that the president is indeed woefully unfit for the office — just as first-term Cabinet members warned us.
The Vanity Fair pieces dropped on Tuesday as Americans from right to left were choking with revulsion at Trump’s obscene “eulogies” on Monday to Hollywood icon Rob Reiner, essentially blaming the director for his and his wife Michele’s slayings, allegedly by their long-troubled son. Together the stories — Wiles’ gobsmacking gift of candor and Trump’s descent to a new low in sliming a beloved dead man — held up perhaps the most revealing mirror yet to the ugliness that is the president.
What Americans saw is a man whose only character is bad character. A man bent on retribution, ignorant of government and heedless of the lives he’s ruined in this country and abroad. As monstrous as Trump’s visage has been shown to be, however, the fact that we are united in disgust should offer hope at the holidays. Hope that in the new year voters will put the brakes to Trump’s depravity by electing candidates in midterm elections who won’t continue to enable him.
Wiles slammed Vanity Fair’s work as a “hit piece” in a social media post, but she identified no factual errors among her real-time disclosures. Among them:
The teetotaling Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” and thinks “that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” (On Monday, Trump copped to that, telling the New York Post he has a “possessive and addictive-type personality.”) At the year’s start, Wiles and Trump agreed that he could spend his first 90 days as president “score-settling” against his political enemies, but Trump characteristically reneged and continues to this day. (“When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”) Against Wiles’ advice, Trump insisted on granting clemency to even the most violent convicted cop-beaters among the Jan. 6 rioters. Trump’s tariffs have been “more painful” and his deportations campaign more cruel — and cruelly mistake-prone — than it should be.
There’s more: Wiles was “aghast” at the demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development; she knew it did “very good work” with humanitarian aid, but Trump “doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.” (Multiple analyses have blamed the shutdown for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide from disease, hunger and childbirth complications.) Trump’s extrajudicial strikes against small boats in Latin America really are about regime change in Venezuela, not drug interdiction, as the White House claims: The U.S. military will keep killing unidentified people until Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “cries uncle.”
In the matter of Jeffrey Epstein’s child-trafficking charges, Wiles revealed, Trump is lying (surprise!) when he repeatedly claims that evidence incriminates former President Clinton (“There is no evidence.”). And although Trump was “mighty unhappy” that the Justice Department relocated Epstein’s convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a country club prison, the president who overtly controls the department did nothing to reverse that grotesque move.
Wiles confirms by her characterizations of her colleagues that Trump in this comeback term is surrounded not by “the best,” as he once famously boasted, or by the sorts of experienced truth-tellers who restrained him in his first go-round, but by kowtowing creeps.
Vice President JD Vance is a “conspiracy theorist” who converted from Trump critic to sycophant for political gain. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in pandering to the MAGA base about releasing the Epstein files. (“There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”) Budget director Russell Vought, who repeatedly vowed to traumatize federal employees, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Wiles described Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of USAID and so much more, as “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck.”
Contending with this clown car steered by the president, Wiles had been widely hailed as the grown-up who was at least trying to keep Trump and his toadies on some semblance of a course. But in the recent articles she comes off as one of the pack. Wiles explicitly doesn’t see her role as constraining Trump, no matter how “aghast” she is about one thing or another.
Trump, the mad king, is indeed wholly unfettered and unfiltered. That Wiles is simply overseeing the madness is symbolized by what Whipple describes as a monitor in her office providing a live feed of Trump’s posts on his Truth Social site. So Wiles often learns about his outbursts, whether policies or poison, along with everyone else.
Like the poison in Trump’s heinous post soon after news of the Reiners’ killings, saying the murders were “due to the anger he caused others” by his “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Unabashed, Trump later piled on from the Oval Office: “I thought he was very bad for our country.”
Deranged? Bad for the country? Once again Trump is projecting.
Even on Fox News, commentators united in condemnation. One conservative columnist, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, assailed Trump as “the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House,” and another, Jim Geraghty of the National Review, savaged him as “a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Are we doomed to endure three more years of this? No. The latest string of bad news for Trump — including, significantly, on the economy — is breaking through in a way that little has before. That’s evident in Republicans’ election losses last month for local, state and federal offices.
May the losses continue, and with them a humbling of the malevolent man in the White House. Happy holidays.
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