A former White House adviser questioned President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles after her explosive Vanity Fair interview dropped last week — suggesting she may have devised the move as “retribution.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, argued that Wiles could be positioning herself as the “innocent bystander at the circus presiding as an enabler,” in an opinion piece published in The Guardian Tuesday.
Blumenthal described how Wiles plays a role: she shirks responsibility, shrugs things off and blames others.
She also deceived Trump, he said.
“Conducting her interviews with Whipple, she misled Trump,” Blumenthal wrote. “She walked out of a meeting with him at one point to see the Vanity Fair writer. ‘Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?’ Trump asked her. ‘It’s an emergency,’ she lied. ‘It doesn’t involve you.’ If Trump didn’t think it was about him, she knew he would not care.”
And despite her actions, nothing has changed. Trump has said that he trusts her.
“If any White House aide had behaved as Wiles did with Whipple, that staffer would be either severely admonished or dismissed by the chief of staff,” Blumenthal wrote.
Her moves could be viewed as payback against Trump — after Wiles admitted to having “quiet qualms” about some of his policies and inner circle, Blumenthal wrote. Ultimately, she has not pushed back against Trump, and it’s likely because she wants to maintain her position.
“As chief of staff, she has stifled her temptation to intervene,” Blumenthal added. “She knows it would be in vain and endanger her. In her interviews with Whipple, she presents herself as a manifestation of learned helplessness.
“But she may know instinctively that Trump, humiliated by her disclosures, might find a way slowly to humiliate her until she resigns. Or were the interviews themselves her retribution for the ineffectiveness he imposes on her?”
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