WASHINGTON—In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair, President Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, whose dismal performance in that job is closely followed by the poor performance of the four chiefs of staff in his first administration, revealed some horrific truths about the current administration.
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, however, incriminates herself by revealing that she never did anything to stop any of the crimes committed in the White House on an almost daily basis.
Trump’s first term in the White House, from 2017 to 2021, was chaotic and dysfunctional. But at least it had some guardrails—some in the White House at that time were concerned about not doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. Not so this time around.
His second term so far is different, reports veteran Vanity Fair White House Bureau Chief Chris Whipple. In his 11 extensive interviews on the record with Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, she told Whipple Trump is just like he was before, except more organized—and that he’s filled his team with sycophants and zealots.
And she proudly says her job is to ensure Trump’s wishes and whims are carried out. In plain language, an enabler.
That goes so far as letting Trump’s Defense—oops, War—Department loose to drag the U.S. into yet another armed conflict, this time attacking Venezuela: Bombing fishing boats, killing dozens, buzzing the country with U.S. aircraft, blockading its ports, seizing its oil tanker and its oil.
What’s next? An outright invasion? Or gradual escalation until tens of thousands of U.S. troops are involved in a land war, a la Vietnam? Wiles didn’t speculate. Democratic lawmakers, in the minority, are trying to stop Trump’s charge towards war. Trump’s aim: Overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who is mobilizing his country, and then steal the country’s oil. Wiles doesn’t say a word about any of that.
Even Trump gets a mild critique from his loyal chief of staff. She says Trump, a teetotaler, has “an alcoholic personality.” He admits it and explains he doesn’t drink because he saw excessive liquor kill his older brother, Fred Trump, at age 42.
Wiles is the normally low-key Florida political guru who ran Trump’s successful 2024 presidential bid and was rewarded for her long loyalty, nine years and counting, with the top job as Trump’s “gatekeeper.” As one former Republican chief of staff told Whipple, only two people have the clout to tell a president “no”: The president’s spouse and the chief of staff.
Wiles, Whipple reported, views her job differently. However much she disagrees with Trump on major decisions and how he carries them out—pardoning all 1,600 U.S. Capitol invaders from Jan. 6, 2021, is an example—he casts the ultimate vote. “Sometimes I get outvoted,” she told Whipple. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
That one, Trump won. He even pardoned the invaders responsible for injuring 140 U.S. Capitol police officers who defended the building and its occupants. Four more died within days, including one who committed suicide the next day in despair.
Trump, who preens himself on being pro-law-and-order—code words to his MAGA base—has yet to say a word about the dead officers. But he praised the one invader police had to shoot, former veteran Ashley Babbitt of San Diego. She tried to smash her way into the U.S. House chamber. After not heeding police warnings, she was fatally wounded.
The interviews also confirm what many outside have long suspected: Trump is even more tyrannical than before, certainly more organized, and has surrounded himself with zealots, some of them extraordinarily odd and at least two who are downright evil.
And this time around, he knows damn well what he’s doing.
Wiles views her job as enabling his orders be carried out, even if she disagrees with them. One is his constant shifting on tariffs. Another is his continuing thirst for “revenge” against so-called “political enemies.” And the portrait she paints of the personalities who run the Trump regime is dismaying. Examples include:
- Vice President JD Vance, who once denounced Trump, turned on a dime to support Trump’s policies, for political reasons. The former GOP Ohio senator has his finger on the pulse of the now-Trumpite-dominated Republican Party far more than anyone suspects, Whipple quotes Wiles as saying.
Vance is also a conspiracy spinner, like so many of Trump’s MAGAites. He’s been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” Wiles said. Vance, remember, floated the theory that Haitian migrants were killing and eating family pets in Ohio. Trump picked it up.
- There are two “absolute haters” in the Trump White House: Russell Vought and Steven Miller.
- Office of Management and Budget Director Vought, the top author of the extreme rightist Trumpite platform, Project 2025, hates federal workers with a passion. That theme runs throughout the project. Wiles calls Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot.” Whipple, noting Wiles is very conservative, wonders whether that’s not criticism, but praise.
Vought, of course, carried out Trump’s deliberate decapitation of federal workers from their jobs and nullified their union contracts, aided by former DOGE czar Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and former addict to ketamine. Ketamine is used in extreme cases as an anesthetic. It’s also a hallucinogen. Musk’s DOGE carried out much of the federal worker and program carnage.
The decapitation’s human impact finally appeared in federal jobless statistics for November and October, delayed due to the 43-day Trump-engineered partial government shutdown. In October 162,000 federal workers lost their jobs, followed by 6,000 in November. Its impact on programs, from civil rights to environmental cleanup to education aid, or lack of it, is ongoing—all under Trump’s watch and Wiles’s oversight.
- Miller, the deputy chief of staff and overseer of Trump’s deportations policy, is just as bad. Whipple, in the first of his two installments in Vanity Fair, does not go into detail about Miller, who has been very public about his hatred of anyone with brown skin.
Whipple didn’t need to do so. Miller did so on Fox “News” the same day the first Vanity Fair story ran.
Miller told Fox the U.S. would be better off admitting only migrants from Northern and Western Europe, as it did from 1924-65, while rejecting everyone else. It even turned away Eastern European victims of Hitler’s Holocaust, especially Jews. Miller is Jewish. Trump would also admit Afrikaner supporters of apartheid.
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former U.S. senator from Florida, genuinely believes in Trump’s policies of evicting “criminal” undocumented people from the U.S. But Rubio has no power over the violent, vicious, and sometimes fatal actions of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Trump’s turned ICE loose to run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution, snatching up, beating, hog-tying, bludgeoning, and even kidnapping any “others” whom Trump hates—throwing them into vans and detention camps without hearings, then deporting them. Even if they’re kids, all U.S. citizens by birth, as young as two or four or seven, with their mothers. The four-year-old came to the U.S., at risk to the mother, for treatment for stage-4 cancer.
That appalls Wiles, she said. ICE has been so vicious that at least 22 people have died at its hands, human rights groups report. Wiles says ICE must do a better job of screening people it picks up so it doesn’t repeat those “mistakes.” That’s all she admitted, not the prejudice and racism of the anti-migrant policy itself.
One of those “mistakes,” among 238 people summarily deported, was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Smart-TD union member who was picked up on a nonexistent deportation order and flown to a hellhole prison in his native El Salvador. In prison, he was tortured.
Abrego Garcia was finally freed last week after Trump returned him to the U.S. under a Supreme Court ruling and political pressure. His case became a cause célèbre for the union movement and Latino organizations. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers think ICE will try to hijack and deport him again.
- Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He’s stacked his department with vaccine deniers like himself, gutted non-partisan medical oversight panels, trashed the federal Centers for Disease Control, and committed so much carnage that life expectancy in the U.S. could go in reverse in the future. Wiles is cheering him on, as is Trump. She calls Kennedy “My Bobby.”
“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,” Wiles said.
- Attorney General Pam Bondi, the former Florida AG who made a name for herself as a Trump defense attorney in the myriad lawsuits arising out of January 6, “absolutely botched the release” of Justice Department findings about the late Jeffrey Epstein. That multimillionaire New York sexual predator hobnobbed with Trump and other socialites. Epstein went to prison and, under unexplained circumstances, died there.
Bondi “completely whiffed” on the Epstein files’ release, Miles told Whipple. “First, she [Bondi] gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
Bondi also followed Trump’s orders, which Wiles said she tried to stop after his first 90 days in office this year, seeking “revenge” against “political enemies.” His targets include Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former FBI Director James Comey, and New York Attorney General Letitia “Tish” James, a Democrat.
That policy, however, is a continuation of decades of literal hatred by the GOP right-wing, in and out of Congress. For them, politics is war, with enemies to be killed by scorched-earth tactics.
Especially if they’re minorities—Schiff is Jewish—or people of color. James is African-American. So are the Democratic mayors of the first three cities ICE invaded: L.A., D.C., and Chicago.
Bondi ordered prosecutors to indict James and Comey in a supposedly friendly federal court in D.C.’s Virginia suburbs. The judges threw the indictments out for lack of evidence. A new prosecutor—Trump and Bondi illegally appointed his predecessor—took both cases to grand juries, where a defense counsel doesn’t even appear. The common assumption about grand juries is that jurors will indict a ham sandwich if prosecutors demand it.
Trump and Bondi, with Wiles looking on, saw the grand juries rebel and refuse to indict both.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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