I don’t think it’s immodest of me to say that the interviews I did with Susie Wiles that appeared in articles in Vanity Fair — in which President Trump’s White House chief of staff described him as having an “alcoholic’s personality” and called Vice President JD Vance “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” — set off a political tempest.
Mr. Trump’s top advisers leaped to Ms. Wiles’s defense, and she called the story a “disingenuously framed hit piece.” But after she initially denied having made certain remarks about Elon Musk (only to be told they were on tape), neither Ms. Wiles nor anyone else in the White House challenged the article’s accuracy.
Ms. Wiles’s remarks raised many questions about the Trump White House. The one I’m asked more than any other is: Why in the world did she agree to be interviewed? I have asked myself that question, as well as another: What did her extraordinarily unguarded remarks reveal about the Trump White House?
Senior White House officials normally parse their words and speak to reporters only on background. Indeed, Ms. Wiles is famously reticent; she normally ducks cameras and shuns interviews. Moreover, she’s a veteran political operative who, as a co-chair of Mr. Trump’s victorious 2024 presidential campaign, brought a measure of discipline to an unruly candidate.
Yet Ms. Wiles engaged in 11 interviews with me over the course of nearly a year as Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff — almost entirely on the record and on audiotape.
When I invited Ms. Wiles to comment for this article on why she spoke to me, she did not respond. But I can tell you what she said at the time. Mr. Trump, in her view, had been vilified by the media during his first term, and she was hellbent on his getting a fair hearing this time. Having read some of my work, she evidently trusted me to deliver a fair accounting of the administration’s efforts. (And I believe I did.)
Critics and pundits had other theories about why she spoke to me: Maybe Ms. Wiles was unaware that she’d be quoted (in fact, she was explicit when she went off the record, which was rare); maybe she was buffing her legacy and distancing herself from some of the Trump administration’s actions; perhaps she was taking a page from Machiavelli to undermine her rivals (for example, putting her thumb on the scale of the 2028 G.O.P. presidential contest in favor of Marco Rubio and against Mr. Vance); or maybe I somehow took advantage of her as a kind of confidence man. Does anyone really believe that I hoodwinked a seasoned political operative like Ms. Wiles into giving away the store?
My theory is simple: People want to tell their stories. Every good biographer knows that most people, if you treat them with fairness and respect, will open up to you.
That includes people who work in the White House — perhaps especially those who do. The Brownlow Committee of 1937 recommended that senior White House officials cultivate a “passion for anonymity.” But few people involved in making history want their contributions to go unnoticed. While writing a book about White House chiefs of staff, I learned that those who served in that often misunderstood position were grateful that someone was bringing attention to it.
And no one is without ego. Ms. Wiles may be famously self-effacing, but as the first female White House chief of staff, she’s acutely aware of her place in history. She has, for example, phoned the 95-year-old James A. Baker III, Ronald Reagan’s quintessential chief, for advice.
I believe there’s another reason Ms. Wiles was so unguarded — one that is peculiar to this White House. Mr. Trump’s first term was marked by dysfunction and chaos, with rival factions battling for influence over the president’s agenda. His second term has been a less fractious, smoother-running operation — Ms. Wiles runs a tighter ship in the West Wing — and this time, nearly everyone is reading from the same ideological script.
Ms. Wiles and her team are so like-minded in their devotion to the president that they’ve in many ways lost touch with the outside world. On what planet would a White House official say out loud, of prosecuting the president’s political enemies, that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it”? Or that Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is a “right-wing absolute zealot”? Or that Mr. Vance’s 180-degree conversion to Trumpism was “sort of political”?
As I discovered, this is the way true believers talk in Mr. Trump’s West Wing. I don’t think Ms. Wiles knew that her comments, outside the White House, would explode like bombs. They were confirmation of an old Washington maxim: The definition of a gaffe is when a powerful official accidentally tells the truth.
Despite her candor, Ms. Wiles’s job seems more secure than ever. Defending her after my story appeared, the president said that Ms. Wiles was right to say he has an alcoholic’s personality; in Trump World, that means larger-than-life, a compliment.
Ms. Wiles’s ongoing tenure raises another question. What sort of job has she done as the White House chief of staff?
The chief of staff’s most important duty is to tell the president hard truths. As Gerald Ford’s chief, Donald Rumsfeld, put it, he is “the one person besides his wife” who can “look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’” That duty is doubly important when serving a president who recognizes few constraints.
Mr. Vance described Ms. Wiles’s vision of her job: “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration that their objective was to control the president or influence the president or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator. …”
When I pressed her on this subject, she was defensive. I had spoken to a former White House chief of staff who had wondered whether she was an enabler or a disciplinarian. “I’m not an enabler,” she snapped. She insisted that she has difficult conversations with Mr. Trump every day.
But she conceded that “they’re over little things, not big.” She said she doesn’t have “these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”
For a White House chief of staff, that’s an abdication of responsibility, a startling admission — and maybe her biggest gaffe of all.
Chris Whipple is the author of, most recently, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” and “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”
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