Susie Wiles, described by President Donald Trump as the most powerful woman in the world, has hit back at a series of Vanity Fair articles in which she made several unflattering comments about members of the administration, including her boss.
Wiles, the first-ever female White House chief of staff, referred to the pieces, published Tuesday morning, as 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. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” Wiles wrote. “The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade. None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt backed Wiles in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history. President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” Leavitt said. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
Wiles, the daughter of former NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, rarely speaks publicly. So, it makes the comments she made to author Chris Whipple over a series of 10 interviews all the more surprising.
She was surprisingly candid when discussing her working relationship with the president himself, saying he has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
She recounted to Whipple helping her father, whom she referred to as a functioning alcoholic, enter treatment in the 1990s. Summerall remained sober for 21 years until his death in 2013.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But 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.” she explained. Trump is famously teetotal.
Unlike the chiefs of staff from Trump’s first term in office, Wiles believes her role is to unquestioningly facilitate Trump’s desires on policy and beyond, even if she personally disagrees with his suggestions.
According to Whipple, the only real area where Wiles hasn’t been in lock step with Trump is the “score settling” against his political enemies.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she stated in a March interview. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
A number of other top Trump aides, however, received sharper characterizations from Wiles.
She claimed that Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that his shift from Trump critic to supporter was “sort of political.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the former leader of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, is an “avowed ketamine” user and an “odd duck” who caused a significant amount of harm during his government tenure, according to Wiles.
And despite Trump’s public claims about the Epstein files, Wiles claimed that Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” on her handling of the affair.
Though the White House backed Wiles on Tuesday morning, multiple out-of-government advisers to the president suggested that they were caught off guard by some of Wiles’s comments to Whipple.
TRUMP TRAVELING TO KEY SENATE STATE FOR NEXT AFFORDABILITY ROAD STOP
“I mean, I didn’t necessarily think she’d go that far on the record, but it’s not like people weren’t already saying these things,” one former senior White House aide told the Washington Examiner, before adding that they doubted Wiles’s comments seriously endangered her standing with the president.