(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was profiled in a two-part Vanity Fair story that features a variety of interviews during Trump’s second term in office.
Throughout the 11 interviews, Wiles made several comments about Trump’s polarizing personality and her views on some of the president’s closest allies.
In response to the release of the articles on Tuesday morning, Wiles has called out Vanity Fair in a post on X, stating: “The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Wiles added.
Here are some of the most crucial takeaways from the interviews:
Trump has an ‘alcoholic’s personality’
Wiles told Vanity Fair that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” which she recognizes due to her father, NFL broadcasting legend Pat Summerall, having suffered from alcoholism throughout much of his life.
“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,” Wiles said.
Trump operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she said.
Wiles told Trump to stop being vindictive after 90 days
In the interviews, Wiles explained that while she doesn’t think the president is “on a retribution tour” in his second term, she admitted that “there may be an element of that from time to time.”
Wiles told Vanity Fair back in March that she and the president had a “loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In a since-deleted accidental Truth Social post from September, Trump criticized the lack of action against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Less than a week later, a federal grand jury indicted Comey, and in October, a Virginia grand jury indicted James. Criminal charges in both instances have been dismissed, and the DOJ has failed to reindict them. Critics of the president argue these were directed attacks at his political opponents.
Trump won’t run in 2028: Wiles
Trump, who would need to pass a constitutional amendment to be elected president for a third term, has floated the idea of running for office again in 2028.
In November, Wiles was asked directly if Trump would run for a third term.
“No,” she said. “But he sure is having fun with it” and knows it’s “driving people crazy.”
Wiles stated that she would support JD Vance if he runs for president: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
In another interview, Wiles explained that the vice president’s transition from Trump critic to one of the figureheads of the MAGA movement was “sort of political” and suggested that Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Musk’s dismantling of USAID left Wiles ‘aghast’
Elon Musk’s time with the Trump administration, though short-lived, has had massive implications on the landscape of the federal government under the Trump administration.
Musk led the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, and in one of his first moves in the position, worked to completely dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Wiles explained initially left her “aghast.”
“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 explained.
Wiles also said that Musk is an “an avowed ketamine” user, a statement she denied in an interview with The New York Times Monday.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” However, Vanity Fair provided audio recordings of the encounter to The New York Times, which has confirmed Wiles indeed made the claim.