Is Susie Wiles an innocent bystander in Trump’s White House? | Sidney Blumenthal | Susie Wiles …

Explore the latest developments concerning Is Susie Wiles.

Is Susie Wiles an innocent bystander in Trump’s White House? | Sidney Blumenthal

As chief of staff, she has stifled her temptation to intervene time and time again

Susie Wiles has the gimlet eye of an alcoholic’s daughter. She is always on edge, vigilant to the slightest movement, fearful of sudden danger, and has learned to withdraw herself from the chaos in order to survive. She is keenly observant, sees through people around her who are not drinkers to decipher their underlying motives that might flare into unexpected menace, and practiced in passive aggression of which her interview with Vanity Fair is a classic case study.
Wiles defines herself as the child of a raging drunk and it is through that singular lens of her formative experience that she defines her current boss. “I make a specialty of it,” she told the writer Christopher Whipple for his Vanity Fair profile of the Trump White House chief of staff in one of the eleven interviews she granted him. Donald Trump, she stated, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” though he does not drink. She didn’t stop there, but elaborated that “high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Trump, she said, “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

Susie Wiles Talks About the First Year of Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2)

On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.

Column: Some truth leaked out of the White House

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

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.

For more detailed information, explore updates concerning Is Susie Wiles.

For more news…