Susie Wiles’s Big Slip Is a Test of Her Power

For all the chaos the second Trump administration has generated, it appears to be remarkably calm at its center, thanks largely to Susie Wiles. The current White House chief of staff differs dramatically from her four first-term predecessors precisely because of the lack of drama surrounding her. There have been relatively few leaks, high-level resignations, or credible reports of internal turmoil in the second Trump White House despite Donald Trump’s impulsiveness and the menagerie of outlandish characters in his orbit.

Considering her powerful role in the administration, it’s remarkable how much Wiles has kept herself out of the spotlight. Axios’s description of her at the beginning of Trump 2.0 has rung true:

Incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles tells Axios in an interview that she aims for the West Wing to be a no-drama zone for staff. If that works, it won’t be the chaotic den of self-sabotaging that stymied the early days of President-elect Trump’s first term.

“I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles, whose boss calls her the Ice Maiden, said by email. “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.”

It’s intensely ironic, then, that Wiles is the source for the first explosive media exposé of the internal dynamics of this White House. On Monday, Vanity Fair published an article by Chris Whipple, the author of a book on White House chiefs of staff, who interviewed Wiles 11 times in the past year. While much of the material presents Wiles as a defender of the president’s motives, agenda, operating style, and historical significance, this paragraph has put her in a world of potential trouble:

One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)

There are other problematic excerpts disclosing Wiles’s low opinion of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files; her indulgent attitude toward her “junkyard dog” deputies, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, and James Blair; and her efforts to convince Trump himself to put a rein on his pursuit of personal vendettas.

Tellingly, in her initial public comment on the Whipple article, Wiles did not contradict any of the specifics but simply denounced it as a “hit piece” in which “significant context was disregarded” and lots of positive stuff she said about the president and his team was “left out of the story.” It’s a classic non-denial denial.

It’s unclear at this early juncture whether Wiles is in any trouble with Trump. But his initial reaction was to defend her “alcoholic’s personality” remark.

“No, 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,” Trump told the New York Post.

The explosiveness of Wiles’s comments immediately reminded veteran political observers of a parallel moment early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as the New York Times notes:

The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.

Stockman was famously “taken to the woodshed” by White House chief of staff James Baker for revealing to the world the backstory of the struggle within and beyond the White House over Reagan’s highly controversial initial budget and tax proposals, which among other things depicted the well-meaning 40th president as being manipulated by his underlings. But the incident really wasn’t much like the one we are witnessing now. In his interviews, Stockman was mostly talking about intense policy disagreements within the administration and the Republican Party. Wiles doesn’t much engage with policy arguments; her interviews make it clear she shares some of Trump’s most controversial policy initiatives (particularly the assault on the deep state) while leaning over backward to rationalize his current warmongering toward Venezuela. And for all her casual slurs about Team Trump, she refers, incredibly, to his inner circle as “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.”

Stockman, moreover, was a huge celebrity in the early days of the Reagan administration and a living symbol of his domestic agenda; Wiles was a noncelebrity until now and apparently had no idea her talks with Whipple would create a stir, notes the Times:

While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.

So the question now is whether Susie Wiles can go back to being a noncelebrity and dismiss her indiscretions as the product of a quietly malicious writer trying to disrupt the calm at the center of the White House. If she does survive this furor without significant damage to her position, then we’ll know she is even more powerful than anyone realized.