Who is Susie Wiles? Why has her Vanity Fair interview stirred controversy? 

United States President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, who is known for operating from well behind the scenes, has suddenly come under the media spotlight as candid interviews with Vanity Fair magazine have stirred controversy.

In the interviews, Susie Wiles was quoted as describing Trump as having an “alcoholic’s personality”, tech tycoon Elon Musk as an “odd, odd duck” and Vice President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist”.

Wiles slammed the two-part Vanity Fair article, which was published on Tuesday, calling it a “hit piece”.

Trump is standing by his top aide, whom he has called the “ice maiden”, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The entire administration is … united fully behind her.”

Here is a closer look at who Wiles is and what the report says:

What is the basis of the Vanity Fair article?

Vanity Fair published a two-part report about the second Trump administration, which began in January. The report is based on the interviews with Wiles by American documentary filmmaker and journalist Chris Whipple over the course of the past year.

Wiles chronicled the first year of Trump’s second term “amid each moment of crisis”, Whipple, who conducted 11 on-the-record interviews with Wiles, wrote.

The first of these interviews took place on January 11, a week before Trump’s inauguration.

Who is Susie Wiles?

Wiles, 68, is the chief of staff at the White House. She is the first woman in history to hold this position.

In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower in New York to meet Trump as he was transitioning from being a real estate developer to a presidential candidate.

In the Vanity Fair piece, Whipple described her as “the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself”.

Whipple quoted an unnamed former Republican Party leader as saying: “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.”

Wiles has risen from a Capitol Hill intern in the 1970s to a top Republican strategist. At the age of 23, she landed a job as a scheduler in the White House when Republican Ronald Reagan was president.

Wiles’s childhood was difficult. Her father, Pat Summerall, a well-known American football announcer, was an alcoholic. She was raised in Stamford, Connecticut and Saddle River, New Jersey, according to the Vanity Fair article.

Here’s what Wiles told Vanity Fair about Trump and his aides, and here is how some of them reacted:

Trump

According to the Vanity Fair report, Wiles said she never doubted Trump would win the presidential election in November 2024.

She added that she was going to present a “new Trump” to the public and even told Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, before Trump’s inauguration that he would see a different side of Trump in his second term. Trump would be calmer and without a temper, she said.

“I’ve not seen him throw anything, I’ve not seen him scream. I didn’t see that really horrible behaviour that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago,” Whipple quoted Wiles as saying in his article.

Although Trump is a teetotaller, Wiles was quoted as saying Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” and he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing”.

In an interview with the New York Post published on Tuesday, Trump defended Wiles.

About the alcoholic comment, Trump said: “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.”

Talking about Whipple’s report, Trump said, “I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair, but [Wiles has] done a fantastic job.”

“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,” the New York Post quoted Trump as saying.

Leavitt also backed Wiles during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday.

“I would just echo my boss, Susie Wiles, who is the best chief of staff in our nation’s history, working for the greatest president in our nation’s history,” Leavitt said. “This was, unfortunately, another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief’s words out of context.

“The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.”

JD Vance

Wiles said the vice president went from opposing Trump to fully supporting him mostly for political reasons. She also described Vance as being into conspiracy theories for about 10 years.

Vance, who also said he had not read the Vanity Fair article, backed Wiles during an address in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

“You know why I really love Susie Wiles? Because Susie is who she is in the president’s presence [and] she’s the same exact person when the president isn’t around,” Vance said.

“I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States, and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that the president could ask for,” he said.

Elon Musk

Wiles also expressed opinions about billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of the private space exploration company SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla.

During the first few months of Trump’s second term, Musk was his close aide, overseeing the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was meant to slash US government bureaucracy. DOGE became known for carrying out mass layoffs of federal government workers and abruptly shutting down the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Wiles described Musk as a “solo actor”, telling Whipple that “the challenge with Elon is keeping up with him.”

“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,” Wiles was quoted in the Vanity Fair article as saying.

Musk has not publicly reacted to the article. In March, he posted on X – formerly known as Twitter, the social media platform he bought in 2022 – saying, “I’m a big fan of Susie Wiles,” in response to a video of him helping Wiles out with a bag.

When Trump named Wiles his chief of staff after winning the November 2024 election, Musk posted a screenshot of news about the announcement and wrote: “Susie Wiles is great.”

Pam Bondi

In the interview, Wiles also criticised Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The wealthy convicted paedophile died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell. Epstein was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Conspiracy theorists claim, however, that he might have been murdered because he maintained a secret client list of powerful individuals, including politicians, who allegedly abused underage girls. In July, the US Department of Justice, which Bondi heads, concluded that Epstein had no client list.

The Justice Department memo angered right-wing conspiracy theorists and a section of the US president’s base of supporters because it was seen as a retreat from a narrative once promoted by members of the Trump administration.

When Bondi was asked in an interview with Fox News in February about a supposed list of Epstein’s clients, she responded: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

The same month, political commentators and far-right influencers were invited to the White House and presented with documents called “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”. Bondi released these documents, which did not contain anything revelatory about the Epstein case.

Whipple wrote that Wiles said Bondi “completely whiffed” on understanding that the conservative influencers she invited to the White House were exactly the audience most interested in the documents.

Wiles was quoted as saying Bondi gave the influencers “binders full of nothingness”. Wiles emphasised: “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

What was Wiles’s  opinion on other issues?

Trump’s January 6 pardons

On January 6, 2021, thousands of rioters, fuelled by false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, stormed the US Capitol to try to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

More than 2,000 people broke into the seat of the US Congress, vandalised offices and fought with police, leaving at least five people dead and many injured.

About 1,270 people were convicted of federal crimes over the riot, and their prison sentences ranged from a few years to more than two decades for leaders of far-right groups.

On the day he was inaugurated for his second term, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 people who were convicted or indicted in the riots, calling their treatment “outrageous”.

Wiles told Whipple that she questioned Trump pardoning all 1,500.

She was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying: “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 added that Trump asserted that even the violent offenders were unfairly treated.

The USAID shutdown

Wiles said she was “aghast” when she learned USAID had been shut down.

“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 was quoted as saying by Whipple.

Attacks on alleged drug boats

Since September, US military strikes on more than 20 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people. The Trump administration has alleged, without evidence, that these boats belong to drug cartels and carry drugs. It has also accused Venezuela’s left-wing government of being involved in drug trafficking.

“We save 25,000 people every time we knock out a boat,” Trump claimed during an interview with Politico published last week.

Wiles was quoted by Whipple as saying: “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times. … These are not fishing boats as some would like to allege.

“The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”

Wiles also affirmed that Trump wants to keep bombing alleged drug boats in the waters off the coast of Venezuela until that country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, “cries uncle”.

How did Wiles react to the Vanity Fair piece?

Wiles criticised the Vanity Fair article as a “disingenuously framed hit piece”.

“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,” she wrote on X on Tuesday.

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” she added.

She then went on to claim that Trump has achieved more in his second term in 11 months than any president in eight years.