Donald Trump’s chief of staff has blown the lid off the inner workings of his second administration in a staggeringly candid series of interviews touching on everything from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the prospects of a third MAGA presidency.
Since the Republican leader’s inauguration earlier in January, his chief of staff Susie Wiles has met with Vanity Fair 11 times to discuss, on the record, the ins and outs of Trump’s earth-shattering second stint at the White House.
Wiles is credited with not only managing the litany of crises and scandals that have engulfed the administration to date, but also having helped assemble Trump’s cabinet of “disrupters” by advocating for picks like FBI Director “Keystone Kash” Patel, Defense Secretary “Pentagon Pete” Hegseth, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem.
“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,” as one former Republican chief described her level of influence at the White House.
It seemed unlikely from her two-part tell-all that others within the Trump administration were aware of the full extent of her conversations with the outlet, which paint a stunningly detailed portrait of the woman behind the MAGA throne.
“They don’t know what I’m doing,” she’s reported to have told journalist Chris Whipple, laughing as she motioned toward the Oval Office during one of their meetings.
The disclosures would not appear to have gone over well at the White House. “The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles wrote on X Tuesday, as she now battles to save her job.
Here’s everything you need to know.
The Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein
Wiles said she’d initially “underestimated the potency” of perhaps the most shocking scandal to have dogged Trump’s second stint at the White House.
On last year’s campaign trail, the president repeatedly pledged full transparency on Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, prompting massive backlash when in June, the Justice Department and FBI determined that contrary to conspiracy theories long-cherished by the MAGA base, the disgraced pedophile’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide, and that he kept no “client list” of uber wealthy co-conspirators.
Amid mounting public backlash and renewed public scrutiny of Trump’s own, once-cozy relationship with the convicted sex trafficker, lawmakers have now forced the president to release any remaining DOJ documents pertaining to the case.
Wiles has confirmed prior reports that Trump’s name indeed appears in those investigative materials. “[He] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file,” she told Vanity Fair, clarifying that from what she’s seen, “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
“[Trump] was on [Epstein’s] plane… he’s on the manifest,” she added. “They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”
She was also quick to pour cold water on Trump’s claims, for which the president has provided no evidence to date, that the documents show President Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s notorious private island a total of 28 times.
“There is no evidence” of those visits, Wiles told the outlet, adding about whether the documents contained damning material about Clinton’s relationship with Epstein: “The president was wrong about that.”
An “Alcoholic Personality,” Driven by Retribution
By her own reckoning, Wiles is well-versed in managing relationships with addictive personalities. Her own father, she says, was an alcoholic, and she says she recognizes many of the same character traits in Trump himself, despite the president’s often-trumpeted teetotalism.
“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 said.
Trump apparently has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Perhaps the starkest evidence of the president’s aggressive, almost obsessive pursuit of his agenda to date has played out in the prosecutions brought against some of his longest-standing adversaries, particularly former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and his own former National Security Adviser, John Bolton.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of the proceedings against Comey. “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Wrecking Balls at the White House
Earlier in September, Trump provoked widespread outcry by demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make way for a new, 90,000 square-foot ballroom funded in large part by donors with vested interests in policies pursued by his administration.
As the president now charges ahead with further plans for a tacky “Arc de Trump” in Washington, DC, modeled on the Arc de Triomphe of Paris fame, Wiles suggests the self-anointed builder-in-chief may not yet have exhausted his appetite for remodelling one of the nation’s most instantly recognizable buildings in his own image.
“I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning,” she said. “I’m not telling,” when pressed on the matter.
Vance’s Love of the Tin Foil Hat Brigade
Vice President JD Vance has, according to Wiles, been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
She didn’t clarify whether this worldview also covers lizard overlords of global finance, staged moon landings, or the infamous bunkers under Denver International Airport — but she did have thoughts on Vance’s leap from “Never Trump guy” to MAGA convert.
“His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political,” she said.
“I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things,” she added of how her view of him changed during his 2022 run for one one of Ohio’s senatorial seats. “And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country.”
Viscous Vought and The Ballard of Quirky Bobby
Wiles describes Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—now Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, and widely credited as the driving force behind MAGA’s slash-and-burn crusade against the federal bureaucracy—as “a right-wing absolute zealot.”
She would also appear to have a special soft spot for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps one of Trump’s most controversial cabinet members, given his credentials as a notorious anti-vaxxer.
“Quirky Bobby,” she calls him. “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.”
Full Credit to Eugenics
Wiles’ has had a storied career in U.S. politics, starting out as a student intern for New York Congressman Jack Kemp in the 1970s before going on to secure jobs at the Ronald Reagan White House and on George H.W. Bush’s first presidential campaign.
Trump, himself a former reality TV star, appears to have been less taken by those credentials at their first meeting in 2015 than by the fact Wiles is the daughter of American football great Pat Summerall.
“He’s said it a million times,” Wiles said of her introduction to the then-future president. “‘I judge people by their genes.’”
Mega MAGA Meltdowns in Miami
While Trump reportedly believes Wiles may be “clairvoyant” in her electoral predictions, her relationship with the MAGA leader has always been plain sailing. In fact, the pair is understood to have almost parted ways after a vicious falling out at one of his Florida golf clubs in the final, anxious rundown to the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, Wiles recalls, was unhappy with his polling in the Sunshine State, which had put him further behind than he was hoping for. “I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving,” she said of him lashing out at her in front of a group of other advisers. “I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
“I finally said, ‘You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice,’” she remembers saying as she stormed out. ““Lo and behold, he called me every day [after that],” she added.
Perhaps a Little Prudence on Pardons?
One of Trump’s first acts upon assuming the presidency again this year was to issue blanket pardons to almost every one of his supporters convicted for attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 elections during the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
Wiles says she urged caution on that front. “I did exactly that,” she said when asked whether she’d suggested the president might want to be more “selective” with his application of clemency.
“I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job’,” she said—contradicting the president’s preferred narrative that Joe Biden, who was not president at the time, in fact charged the bureau with staging those riots as part of a “Democratic hoax.”
“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she conceded. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
Managing Musk
Earlier in May, toward the end of Elon Musk’s explosive tenure as head of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative, the New York Times released a report detailing how the Tesla CEO’s drug use was reportedly far more severe and excessive than had previously been known.
Wiles appears to be under no illusions about the SpaceX founder’s penchant for self-medication. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she said. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
She adds that Musk’s coup at USAID, and his subsequent shutdown of the United States’ chief agency providing desperately needed humanitarian aid to millions across the planet, took her wholly by surprise. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “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.”
Sandbags on Tariffs
By most metrics, the U.S. economy is not faring well under the second MAGA administration. GBP growth is down almost half from the previous year, inflation remains persistently high at almost 3 percent, and nearly half of all Americans say the current cost-of-living crisis is the worst they’ve ever seen.
Many economists chalk these financial woes up to the president’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs earlier in April, marking the launch of Trump’s ongoing trade war against much of the rest of the planet.
Concerns appear to have been widespread among Trump’s advisers, with Wiles scrambling behind the scenes to shore up support for the president’s proposed fiscal measures.
“I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there,” she remembers telling staffers.
“It’s been more painful than I’d expected,” she added.
Reign of ICE
Trump’s second stint in the White House has witnessed perhaps the most aggressive anti-immigration crackdown in U.S. history, with experts warning the frenzied pace of deportations across the country has resulted in rampant violations of due process and migrant rights under the Constitution.
“I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” Wiles reflected in response to the MAGA administration’s notorious deportation of Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia in March, which the White House attributed to a “clerical error.”
“If there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check,” she later said of the same process, seemingly contradicting the government’s own published notices that “in some cases, a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in immigration court.”
Cut the Feeds
In February, Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for an Oval Office summit widely panned by critics as little more than a diplomatic disaster.
Over the course of the sitdown, the MAGA leader and JD Vance repeatedly berated Zelensky over a perceived lack of gratitude for U.S. support amid the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, in what was roundly received as a diplomatic boon to the aggressor in that conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“If we had it to do over,” Wiles said, “I wouldn’t have cameras, because it was going to end that way.”
She further adds that the confrontation exploded as a result of Zelensky supposedly skipping out on an earlier meeting with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv. “It just was a bad sort of sentiment all the way around,” she said. “And I wouldn’t say JD snapped, because he’s too controlled for that. But I think he’d just had enough.”
Make America Great Again… and Again… and Again?
Trump has repeatedly toyed in public with the prospect of running for a third term in the White House. Wiles, for her part, thinks such musings, roundly decried by his critics, amount to little more than trolling.
“No,” she said when asked whether the president is seriously weighing the possibility of defying more than 250 years of Constitutional history. “But he sure is having fun with it,” she quickly added, noting he knows it is “driving people crazy.”
In defiance of latest polls, she remains similarly adamant that the president’s plummeting ratings will have little impact on next year’s crucial race for control of the House and Senate.
“We’re going to win the midterms,” she said.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment on this story. “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,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
