United States President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, who is known for operating from well behind the scenes, has suddenly come under the media spotlight as candid interviews with Vanity Fair magazine have stirred controversy.
In the interviews, Susie Wiles was quoted as describing Trump as having an “alcoholic’s personality”, tech tycoon Elon Musk as an “odd, odd duck” and Vice President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist”.
Wiles slammed the two-part Vanity Fair article, which was published on Tuesday, calling it a “hit piece”.
Trump is standing by his top aide, whom he has called the “ice maiden”, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The entire administration is … united fully behind her.”
Here is a closer look at who Wiles is and what the report says:
What is the basis of the Vanity Fair article?
Vanity Fair published a two-part report about the second Trump administration, which began in January. The report is based on the interviews with Wiles by American documentary filmmaker and journalist Chris Whipple over the course of the past year.
Wiles chronicled the first year of Trump’s second term “amid each moment of crisis”, Whipple, who conducted 11 on-the-record interviews with Wiles, wrote.
The first of these interviews took place on January 11, a week before Trump’s inauguration.
Who is Susie Wiles?
Wiles, 68, is the chief of staff at the White House. She is the first woman in history to hold this position.
In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower in New York to meet Trump as he was transitioning from being a real estate developer to a presidential candidate.
In the Vanity Fair piece, Whipple described her as “the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself”.
Whipple quoted an unnamed former Republican Party leader as saying: “So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie.”
Wiles has risen from a Capitol Hill intern in the 1970s to a top Republican strategist. At the age of 23, she landed a job as a scheduler in the White House when Republican Ronald Reagan was president.
Wiles’s childhood was difficult. Her father, Pat Summerall, a well-known American football announcer, was an alcoholic. She was raised in Stamford, Connecticut and Saddle River, New Jersey, according to the Vanity Fair article.
What did Wiles say about Trump and his aides?
Here’s what Wiles told Vanity Fair about Trump and his aides, and here is how some of them reacted:
Trump
According to the Vanity Fair report, Wiles said she never doubted Trump would win the presidential election in November 2024.
She added that she was going to present a “new Trump” to the public and even told Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, before Trump’s inauguration that he would see a different side of Trump in his second term. Trump would be calmer and without a temper, she said.
“I’ve not seen him throw anything, I’ve not seen him scream. I didn’t see that really horrible behaviour that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago,” Whipple quoted Wiles as saying in his article.
Although Trump is a teetotaller, Wiles was quoted as saying Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” and he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing”.
In an interview with the New York Post published on Tuesday, Trump defended Wiles.
About the alcoholic comment, Trump said: “She meant that I’m – you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that, but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself. I do. It’s a very possessive personality.”
Talking about Whipple’s report, Trump said, “I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair, but [Wiles has] done a fantastic job.”
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,” the New York Post quoted Trump as saying.
Leavitt also backed Wiles during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday.
“I would just echo my boss, Susie Wiles, who is the best chief of staff in our nation’s history, working for the greatest president in our nation’s history,” Leavitt said. “This was, unfortunately, another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief’s words out of context.
“The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.”
JD Vance
Wiles said the vice president went from opposing Trump to fully supporting him mostly for political reasons. She also described Vance as being into conspiracy theories for about 10 years.
Vance, who also said he had not read the Vanity Fair article, backed Wiles during an address in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
“You know why I really love Susie Wiles? Because Susie is who she is in the president’s presence [and] she’s the same exact person when the president isn’t around,” Vance said.
“I’ve never seen her be d