Donald Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality”; JD Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”; Elon Musk is an “odd, odd duck”. And the internal divisions were “huge” over Washington’s so-called liberation day tariffs that rattled markets in April and had to be rolled back.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, delivered those judgments on the president and his inner circle in an explosive interview with Vanity Fair magazine that was published on Tuesday and contained unusually biting critiques of key figures in the administration.
Ms Wiles (68), a political consultant from Florida, served as Mr Trump’s campaign manager last year and has been credited with bringing effectiveness, if not order, to the president’s operation throughout the election and, at times, to the White House.
“I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” Ms Wiles said in the interview. She claimed that as the daughter of an alcoholic father, she thought that Mr Trump had an “alcoholic’s personality” – recognising similar character traits even though the president does not drink.
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He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” Ms Wiles said. But while she offered a positive spin to her assessment of Mr Trump, her verdict on Mr Vance, the vice-president and political heir-apparent of the president’s Maga movement was more damning.
When discussing the pressure on Mr Trump to release all the files related to the deceased sex trafficker and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles said the issue had been especially important to Mr Vance because he had been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”. She also took a dig at Mr Vance’s transformation from Trump critic to a prominent cheerleader, suggesting it was a calculated move.
“His conversion came when he was running for the Senate,” Ms Wiles said, referring to Mr Vance’s winning 2022 campaign for a seat in the upper chamber of Congress representing Ohio. “And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political,” she added.
In the interview, Ms Wiles also discussed Mr Musk’s way of operating in the White House soon after Mr Trump began his second term, when the billionaire was tasked with slashing government programmes and agencies.
“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she said. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime,” she said. “And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Ms Wiles confessed she was “initially aghast” when Mr Musk moved to gut the US agency for international development. “I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she said.
But she revealed that a bigger split within Mr Trump’s team came over trade policy and the massive levies imposed on most US trading partners in April, with hardliners winning out over administration officials who urged a more guarded approach.
“There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea,” Ms Wiles said. “It’s been more painful than I expected.”
Later on Tuesday, Ms Wiles appeared to row back on her comments, calling the Vanity Fair interview “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history”.
“I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team,” she wrote on X.
Mr Trump told the New York Post on Tuesday he supported Ms Wiles after the publication of the interview. “I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair – but she’s done a fantastic job.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
