President Trump’s chief of staff says Vice President JD Vance is a “conspiracy theorist” and has been at least “for a decade.”
Susie Wiles made the claim in a stunning tell-all interview with Vanity Fair released Tuesday. She put Vance in the same category as FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino when it came to recognizing the “big deal” surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying they all “lived in that world.”
Before he became a rising star in Republican politics, Vance described conspiracy theories as the ramblings of “fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy.” But Vance, once an avid never-Trumper, has embraced debunked and sometimes wild postulations since being promoted from a fairly sensible Ohio Senator to Trump’s number two.
Since he was invited into the MAGA fold, Vance has claimed that Democratic governments allowed fentanyl to pour into the U.S. to kill off GOP voters, praised Sandy Hook-denier Alex Jones, and repeatedly echoed debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Before the president’s sweeping pardons, he called Jan. 6 insurrectionists “political prisoners,” and also repeated Trump’s claims that Haitian immigrants have a taste for pets and abduct cats and dogs to feast on them.
Vance “entirely reinvented himself” before becoming a leading figure of MAGA world, Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and expert on the history of conspiracy theories, told PBS last year.
Wiles agrees. She said his inconspicuous shift towards embracing Trump was “sort of political.”
“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, comparing the shift with that of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had also publicly sparred with Trump.
Vance himself said he had some sort of Trumpian awakening. “I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country,” he told Vanity Fair on Nov. 13.
His office has been asked for comment by the Daily Beast.
Vance has continued his conspiratorial spin since entering office, and even welcomed other conspiracy-mongers into the heart of U.S. politics. In June, he sat down with Laura Loomer for a one-on-one meeting. She has since been embraced by the Trump administration despite her own wild postulations and overt anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Outside of political theories, Vance also admitted that he is a “mad UFO believer” during an interview in late October. He said both he and Marco Rubio have been compelled by stories of flying saucers since their Senate days.
Wiles was interviewed by Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple over a months-long period, starting a week before Trump ascended to the Oval Office for a second time, in early 2025. She made several stunning comments, including that the president has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Wiles said she recognized aspects of Trump’s personality from her former alcoholic father, who died in 2013 after being sober for 21 years.
“Some clinical psychologist who knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” Wiles said. “But high-functioning alcoholics, or alcoholics in general, have exaggerated personalities when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She added that Trump “operates with a view that there’s nothing he can’t do—nothing, zero, nothing.”
