‘Conspiracy theorist’, ‘right-wing zealot’: Trump’s chief of staff lets fly in secret interviews

Washington: President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles called Vice President JD Vance a conspiracy theorist and one of his top aides a “right-wing absolute zealot” in a series of extraordinarily candid interviews that shed light on the inner workings of the White House.

A political strategist whom many credit as the stabilising force behind Trump’s second presidency, Wiles spoke throughout the year with author and filmmaker Chris Whipple, who published the conversations overnight in a double feature with Vanity Fair magazine.

Wiles, whose football-playing father suffered from alcoholism, said Trump had “an alcoholic’s personality” because it is regularly exaggerated and he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do”.

She acknowledged Trump appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files and flew on the deceased financier’s plane, but said there was nothing incriminating about it. “They were … sort of young, single playboys together,” she said.

Elon Musk was an “avowed ketamine [user]” who slept in a sleeping bag in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House during his tenure heading the Department of Government Efficiency, Wiles told the magazine.

She was highly critical of the frenzied period where Musk and his young acolytes shut down the Agency for International Development, saying: “No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one.”

And she admitted there was an element of retribution in Trump’s attempts to have his political enemies charged with crimes, such as former FBI director James Comey and, especially, New York Attorney-General Letitia James.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles told Whipple back in March. Comey was indicted in September and James in October, but the charges were thrown out when a judge found Trump’s prosecuting attorney Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed.

The candour of the remarks – given in a series of on-the-record phone calls and an in-person interview over the course of 2025 – are rare for any senior White House official, let alone a chief of staff who rarely speaks publicly and prefers to remain in the background.

Wiles responded on X – her first post of the year. “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 said.

“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.

“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honoured to work for the better part of a decade.”

Other White House officials joined the backlash – including Russell Vought, director of the powerful Office of Budget and Management and architect of the Trump policy blueprint Project 2025 – whom Wiles described as a “right-wing absolute zealot” in the Vanity Fair article.

“Susie Wiles is an exceptional chief of staff,” he said, adding that Trump’s White House had never worked better. “In my portfolio, she is always an ally in helping me deliver for the president. And this hit piece will not slow us down.”

The Wiles interviews are also significant for what they reveal about the political philosophy of the president’s most powerful aide, her role in managing Trump and her assessment of his disruptive cabinet.

In one January conversation defending the appointment of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defence (now war), Wiles said the “deep state” – a fixation of many conspiratorial MAGA supporters – was not a State Department issue but a Defence one.

“It’s the military-industrial complex,” she said. Hegseth was the right person to disrupt that, she reportedly added.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – or “quirky Bobby”, as Wiles called him – pushed the envelope too far. “But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”

Wiles was critical of Attorney-General Pam Bondi for failing to grasp the import of the Epstein files to many of Trump’s supporters, particularly the younger alt-right activists popular on social media.

Bondi signed off on the Department of Justice’s July memo that declared the administration would not release any more of the so-called “Epstein files”, and that there was no Epstein “client list” – after earlier implying she had the client list in her possession.

Wiles said Bondi “completely whiffed” on appreciating the depth of feeling about the Epstein issue within a particular cohort of supporters, using a baseball term for when a striker tries unsuccessfully to hit the ball.

Vance, along with FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, were among the few administration officials who understood the issue because they were part of that online conspiratorial world, Wiles told the magazine. Vance, she said, “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade”.

She also described Vance’s conversion to a Trump supporter as “sort of political”, implying it was expedient for Vance’s own political gain. Vance had previously called Trump unfit for office and likened him to Adolf Hitler.

Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, Vance said he had not read the article, but Wiles was the best chief of staff the president could ask for because she would never be duplicitous or disloyal away from his gaze.

“Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true,” he said, suggesting the media’s alleged cover-up of former president Joe Biden’s decline as an example.

“If any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets.”

Trump is yet to comment publicly, but he regularly lavishes praise on Wiles and notes she is the first female White House chief of staff in US history.

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