President Trump led an effort to close ranks around White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday, seeking to contain damage of Wiles’s own making.
The furor was kicked off by a move that stunned Washington.
Wiles — known both for a relative aversion to the spotlight and for imposing some discipline on the chaotic world around Trump — gave 11 interviews to author and journalist Chris Whipple, resulting in a Vanity Fair story published Tuesday morning.
In those interviews, Wiles offered startlingly candid views on a number of people in Trump’s orbit.
She alluded to Elon Musk’s ketamine use and said his assailing of the United States Agency for International Development had at first left her “aghast.” She said Attorney General Pam Bondi had “completely whiffed” in her initial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In the process of suggesting Vice President Vance was more attuned to the base’s feelings on the Epstein matter than Bondi was, Wiles called Vance “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
As for budget director Russell Vought, he was “a right-wing absolute zealot,” in Wiles’s estimation — though it’s not clear the deeply conservative Wiles meant this as a criticism.
As for the president himself, he as “an alcoholic’s personality,” according to Wiles.