By BILL BARROW
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles offered an unusually candid look inside President Donald Trump’s administration in a series of interviews published Tuesday by Vanity Fair magazine, delivering details and reservations that presidential aides usually save for memoirs.
From criticizing Attorney General Pam Bondi as having “whiffed” on the Jeffrey Epstein case to saying that no rational person could believe Elon Musk did a good job dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, Wiles revealed her own thoughts about her boss and the work of his aggressive administration. The assessments are even more notable because Wiles, before now, has maintained a low profile.
Wiles dismissed Vanity Fair’s work as a “hit piece,” and a number of Cabinet officials and other aides rushed to her defense. But Wiles notably has not denied any details or quotes.
Here are some takeaways from Wiles’ interview:
Wiles defends Trump while comparing him to an alcoholic
Wiles described Trump as an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often unconcerned about process and policy details.
She assessed Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” even though the president does not drink. But the personality trait is something she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.
“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 said.
Said Wiles: “I’m not an enabler. … I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
Trump’s revenge crusade has gone longer than Wiles initially wanted
Wiles affirmed Trump’s ruthlessness and determination to achieve retribution against those he considers his political enemies, especially those who prosecuted him.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles said early in Trump’s second administration, telling Vanity Fair she did try to tamp down Trump’s penchant for retribution.
But in August 2025, she shifted. “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said, arguing Trump has a different principle: “‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’”
Still, she said, “there may be an element of that from time to time” and Trump “will go for it … when there’s an opportunity.”
“Who would blame him?” she asked rhetorically. “Not me.”
Asked about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Wiles allowed, “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
On Epstein, Pam Bondi gets scorched and Trump was ‘wrong’ about Bill Clinton
In some of her most eye-popping commentary, Wiles said Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on handling the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, particularly trying to manage public expectations by suggesting the Justice Department had a client list waiting to be disclosed only for the administration to later say it doesn’t exist.
Wiles also said Trump pushed false narratives that former President Bill Clinton frequented Epstein’s infamous island. “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles, and there are no damning findings concerning Clinton at all.
“The president was wrong about that,” Wiles said.
Wiles pays attention to Trump’s inner circle — and has thoughts
Wiles often sits to the side in the Oval Office, out of camera view. But she’s paying attention.
Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” she said, and his MAGA conversion — he once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler — was “sort of political.”
Elon Musk overstepped on his Department of Government Efficiency efforts, she said. She called him “a complete solo actor … an odd, odd duck” and an “avowed ketamine user.” (Musk has acknowledged using the dissociative anesthetic.) She recalled having to explain to him that “you can’t just lock people out of their offices” and said his gutting of USAID left her “initially aghast.“
“Because 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 said, adding that “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
She calls Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “quirky Bobby” and White House budget chief Russell Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot.”
But in praising Kennedy, Wiles explained her embrace of the administration’s hard-liners: “He pushes the envelope — some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”
Wiles sees Trump’s tariffs as ‘more painful’ than expected
Few events undermined Trump’s standing quite like his April 2 announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs, in which he announced import taxes ranging from 10% to 99% on most of the world. Trump’s move sparked recession fears and a delay in imposing his wider tariff strategy, leading to a rollercoaster of negotiations and new tariff threats.
Wiles called the April rollout “so much thinking out loud” and said there were internal disputes about it among Trump’s aides. She said she told aides to “work into what he’s already thinking” and asked Vance to tell Trump to “not talk about tariffs today” until his team was “in complete unity.”
Trump proceeded on his own.
Wiles said she believed a middle ground on tariffs would be successful. But, she concluded, “It’s been more painful than I expected.”
Wiles concedes mistakes on immigration
When a federal judge chided the administration for deporting Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Trump publicly defended the approach despite the administration telling the court it was a mistake. Wiles did not mince words, telling Vanity Fair at the time, “We’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation.”
When the administration deported two mothers and their U.S. citizen children, including one who was a cancer patient, Wiles was even more plainspoken: “It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know. I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
Trump is more skeptical of Putin’s intentions than reflected in public
After nearly four years of fighting, Trump has made the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin can be persuaded to end the war in Ukraine if Kyiv agrees to cede Ukrainian land in the eastern Donbas region and if Western powers offer economic incentives that would bring Russia back into the economic world order.
“I actually think that President Putin wants to see it end,” Trump told reporters Monday.
But Wiles offered deep skepticism to Vanity Fair about Putin.
“The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles said in August, referring to the oblast that is a key part of Donbas.
“Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told her interviewer.
For Trump, boat strikes are about knocking Nicolás Maduro out of power
Wiles said in November that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
Trump has repeatedly said Maduro’s “days are numbered” as the U.S. intensifies deadly attacks on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. The administration alleges the targets are drug-smuggling cartels.
Still, Trump and administration officials have stopped short of saying they want to topple the Maduro regime. They insist the strikes, which have killed at least 95 people in 25 known incidents since September, are a strategy to stem the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S.
Associated Press reporters Aamer Madhani and Josh Boak contributed from Washington.