Topline
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said her controversial comments on President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and other top White House officials were taken out of context Tuesday, hours after Vanity Fair published her blunt assessment of the Trump White House.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles looks on during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and President of Argentina Javier Milei in the Cabinet Room at the White House on October 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
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Key Facts
Wiles called the Vanity Fair article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history” in a statement.
Notably, Wiles doesn’t dispute any specific facts in the article, but instead alleges “significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story.”
Key Comments From Wiles In Vanity Fair Article
On Trump: He has “an alcoholic’s personality”—of the famously nondrinking president—which Wiles describes as having “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do.”
On Vance: “A conspiracy theorist for a decade,” she said, referring to his push to release the so-called Epstein files.
On Musk: Wiles speculated he was “microdosing” (Musk has famously been accused of using drugs, which he has aggressively denied) when he reposted a tweet (which he’s since deleted) falsely claiming “public sector workers” under Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed millions. Describing what it’s like to work with Musk, Wiles said “the challenge with Elon is keeping up with him . . . he’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are.”
She said she was “initially aghast” when Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No rational process could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody,” she said, referring to Musk’s hasty decision-making.
On the Epstein files: Trump “is in the file . . . and he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Trump appeared on flight manifests for “with young, single playboys together,” she said. Wile said “the president was wrong about” former President Bill Clinton being incriminated in the files and there’s “no evidence” he visited Epstein’s private island dozens of times, as Trump has claimed.
Wiles said Trump “was mighty unhappy” when Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a lower-security prison.
She also insisted Trump didn’t write the sexually suggestive birthday note to Epstein that was revealed by The Wall Street Journal and later in a trove of documents from Epstein’s estate released by House Democrats: “That letter is not his, and nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have.”
On Russ Vought, Project 2025 head and Office of Management and Budget Director: “A right-wing absolute zealot.”
On the military campaign against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said, referring to the pressure on Maduro to step down, though the White House has insisted publicly the attacks are strictly designed to mitigate the flow of drugs into the U.S.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/12/16/trump-chief-of-staff-wiles-attacks-article-quoting-her-about-presidents-alcoholics-personality/
