Has Trump’s chief of staff revealed White House secrets?

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1:14She's credited with masterminding Donald Trump's return to the White House. She is one of the most powerful women in America. I think it's fair to say one of the most powerful women in the world. as Donald Trump himself implied after he won the election last year. Let me also express my tremendous appreciation for Susie and Chris, the job you did. Susie, come Susie, come here. Come here, Susie. Chris, come here, Chris. Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you. The ice baby, we call her the ice baby.

1:52Suzy likes to stay in the background. She's not in the background. Suzy Wiles, Donald Trump's chief of staff, has given an interview now, though, to Vanity Fair, in which she described her boss as having an alcoholic's personality and called the vice president, J.D. Vance, a conspiracy theorist. The White House says it's a hit piece, but it is the most revealing glance inside the White House that we have had so far in the second administration. We're going to talk more about it. Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:49Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it's Anthony in the American headquarters of AmeriCast in Washington, D.C. We have a great interview to bring to you. It is an interview with Chris Whipple. He is the journalist behind the extraordinary interview with Donald Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, an interview that he did for Vanity Fair. And actually not just one interview, he did a whole set of interviews that he's now put together and published. We will get to what the interview says in just a moment. I suppose first, though, Anthony, we should talk a bit about Susie Wiles herself.

3:21So she's the chief of staff. She was, wasn't she, an absolutely central figure in the Trump team when they were trying to get elected for the second time. A guy called Chris Lasavita and her really ran the whole operation. So she's not a kind of Johnny or a Janet come lately, is she? She's very much part of the Trump orbit, a central part of it. She is. And even going back to the 2016 race, she was involved in Donald Trump's Florida campaign. She's from Florida. Donald Trump won Florida that year on the part to a surprising victory over Hillary Clinton. So she has been connected to Donald Trump for the entirety of Donald Trump's rise to national American politics, the pinnacle of American politics, and is a trusted voice, was a trusted voice on the campaign trail.

4:10And now is as the chief of staff, perhaps the most influential senior advisor to Donald Trump. The chief of staff is the gatekeeper to the Oval Office, the person who determines who gets to see the president, what gets put in front of that person's nose, the president's schedule. I mean, all of it is essential and puts the chief of staff into a position of being the power player in most White Houses. And I think you could say also in this White House. If you want to sum it up in a picture, it's that really famous shot, isn't it, of George W. Bush in that school on the day that 9-11 happens. And the moment it is obvious that it is a terrorist attack and the person whispering in his ear, it's an iconic photo, isn't it, is Andy Card, who was his chief of staff.

5:06That is the closeness of the relationship. You are the person who breaks the bad news. You're the gatekeeper in a way, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah. And I think people compared it to the first lady or first man and the chief of staff are the two people who should be able to come up to a president and say, you're wrong. You're making a mistake where everyone else has to worry about about bending to the president's will. The chief of staff has to be a person who will put a line in the sand and say no or tell the president to do something else. Right. And she is very loyal to him and he is pretty loyal to her.

5:41Let's listen to Donald Trump heaping praise on Susie Wiles at the White House summer soiree. It was back in June. Suzy, I'll tell you what, she's the first woman chief of staff in the history of our country. And I'm surprised to hear that. And I watch those men and she watches over them. And if they get a little bit out of line, they may be big, big shots defense. They may be at commerce. They may be the biggest. They're scared of her. They're afraid. They don't want her coming after them. It's a really important point, that, isn't it, Anthony? The point that he's making there is that there are a lot of big egos in the White House, hanging around the White House, trying to get the ear of the president.

6:26And at least until she gave this interview, everyone said, well, she's not one of those egos. She's really happy to be in the shadow. She's very powerful. Nobody suggested anything other than that. But she didn't have a big ego and didn't actually talk much to the media, did she? Right. No, she's been behind the scenes. I've seen her plenty of times in the White House during Trump's events or on the campaign trail, and she's always there. She's always in the room, but she's off to one side. You know, she's kind of hovering over, watching. You could see, you know, watch her eyes, and she's looking around the room and looking at the president.

7:01But she's not one of these people who commands the spotlight, and a good chief of staff really isn't supposed to. And you could contrast what she's done so far this term, Donald Trump's second term, with the revolving door of chiefs of staff that Donald Trump had during his first term in office, where he had Rance Priebus, who was a former head of the Republican National Committee, come in. And you remember, he was very dramatically left on a raining tarmac when Donald Trump fired him and Air Force One took off and he had to find his own way home because the two of them had such a dramatic falling out.

7:38Or John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's Homeland Security secretary, then brought in a former Marine general, brought in to run a tight ship as chief of staff. And he butted heads with Donald Trump throughout his time there and eventually became a critic of Donald Trump's during the 2024 presidential campaign. It was a source of a lot of unflattering stories about about Trump. So now you have a loyalist there, someone who not only has Donald Trump's back and Donald Trump believes that she has his back, but also apparently is very good at her job and good at managing, as you mentioned, all of these different egos and all of these different currents and tensions that are pulling Donald Trump one direction or another.

8:25But here she is doing, I mean, it was 11 interviews, was it, with a single reporter with Chris Whipple? We ought to talk a bit about some of the top lines. I mean, one of them that really has caught people's attention. She describes Donald Trump as having an alcoholic's personality, which is not helpful to the president, it seems to me. No, and Donald Trump doesn't drink alcohol, which is kind of an interesting factoid. His brother actually died of alcoholism, diseases related to alcoholism. So Donald Trump doesn't drink. And what Wiles was saying was comparing Donald Trump to her father, Pat Summerall, who was a famous football player and an even more famous football announcer in the NFL.

9:13One of the reasons why I think Donald Trump likes Susie Wiles so much is that he was a big football fan and he knew Pat Summerall. But Wiles has described how Summerall, her father, was an alcoholic, battled alcoholism throughout his adult life, and that it tends to make people's personalities even bigger and more brash. And so she was comparing that to Donald Trump, who thinks he can do no wrong and is big and is brash. And that is not the fact that Donald Trump drinks or has an addictive personality, but that his personality is such in a similar manner to people who do drink and become these big, brash, oversized personalities who think they can do no wrong.

9:53And it's worth saying that Donald Trump has talked to the New York Post. He was doing an interview after this article came out in Vanity Fair. And he said, I've said that many times about myself. This is that he's got an alcoholic personality. I'm fortunate I'm not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I've said that. What's the word? Not possessive. Possessive and addictive type personality. That's exactly what he said. So actually, he's basically saying, yes, I'm not sure necessarily would have wanted it brought up in these terms, but he's not denying it. and he's certainly about that.

10:23He's agreed, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is other less helpful stuff, though, including about J.D. Vance. I mean, this is the, you know, you were pointing at this from the first administration, which basically went a bit crazy occasionally, didn't it? And people, you know, they weren't left on the tarmac. They were briefing the press against other people in the administration. It all went really genuinely haywire. And it's really striking, isn't it, Anthony, that up until now, this has been a very disciplined ship actually certainly compared with the first Trump administration but now you've got in this interview Susie Wiles saying of J.D.

10:59Vance that he's been a conspiracy theorist for a decade but also it seems to me more damagingly his conversion to being a Trump loyalist was political in other words driven by political ambitions rather than principle and she says of Rubio actually he's genuinely changed his mind he didn't like Trump and now he does But with Vance, she seems to be saying, well, you can't trust him as much. And that's I mean, that's an unhelpful thing for a chief of staff in the White House to say, isn't it? Yeah. Wiles in these interviews really has pulled back the curtain and showed us some of the divisions within this White House.

11:36And, yeah, saying that about Vance and I mean, it's no secret. I mean, he was critical of Donald Trump before he ran for Senate. And and so I think, you know, it's a valid critique to say that he changed the stripe, possibly because of political expediency. But also she took swipes at Pam Bondi and the attorney general and her handling of the Epstein file release that said that she really whiffed on that. She was critical of Elon Musk saying that he was a ketamine user and a very strange, strange bird. and she criticized or expressed skepticism about Donald Trump's January 6th pardons and the pardoning of some of the more violent offenders about Trump's mass deportation.

12:20She talked about how there was a big debate in the White House in the run-up to Donald Trump's tariff policy announcement that there were people inside Donald Trump's inner circle who were vehemently opposed to these tariffs, saying that they were going to harm the economy. And so we've seen now that there are these rivalries and this jockeying for position and that some of these people aren't always on the same page. And I mean, it's partially a testament to her and the way she's run the White House that from the outside, they have had a united front so far. But now we get to see that that's not always the case.

12:55Two other things, two areas where she directly, it seems to me, treads on Trump's toes. One is, she says, of Bill Clinton. So Trump keeps saying that Bill Clinton went to the island that was owned by Jeffrey Epstein, where he abused women. He keeps saying Clinton was there. Clinton went on the plane. She says, Susie Wiles says in this interview, that the president is wrong about that. There isn't the evidence there, which is really interesting, given that she's seen some of this material. And it is a direct contradiction of the president. She also says a Pam Bondi, the attorney general. She says she whiffed it when it comes to a peculiarly American phrase when it comes to, you know, whether there is a dossier and the dossier have names in it and all the rest of it.

13:42And can she produce the dossier? And of course, she initially said she was going to produce it. And then it was stuff turned out that had originally already been out there. And now they're getting in a real mess about whether whether they can produce names that are of interest to their own supporters. And Susie Wells is pretty critical of Pam Bondi as well. So there's kind of plenty of there's plenty of meat in there, isn't there? And for the time being, it's exactly as you say, isn't it, Anthony? It allows the curtain to be drawn on people and they're able to defend themselves and they are defending themselves and also defending her.

14:20But even as they do it, the eyes of the nation are a little bit more open than they were. So on the defense side of things, you know, Elon Musk has actually previously acknowledged that he's tried ketamine. He says he doesn't use it now. And when it comes to the stuff about J.D. Vance, that he's a conspiracy theorist who has been for a decade, etc., etc., he's also addressed that head on. We ought to listen to it. I'll trust what you said. I haven't looked at the article. I, of course, have heard about it. but conspiracy theorists sometimes i am a conspiracy theorist but i only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true

15:03and and by the way suzy and i have joked in private and in public about that for a long time for example i believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills. And you know why I really love Susie Wiles? Because Susie is who she is in the president's presence. She's the same exact person when the president isn't around. I've never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes. And that's what you wanted to staff for.

15:45So there you have J.D. Vance downplaying the criticisms that Susie Wiles had of him making light of it. And I think it's remarkable how all of the senior Trump officials have all kind of circled the wagons and come to her defense. And it's a testament to the power she clearly has. No one wants to cross her. And also, I think it's a reflection of the fact that this is a White House that doesn't want to be seen as sniping at each other. They're all, they seem to be, at least publicly, team players. So for the time being, they seem to be speaking all from the same page still. Yeah, and Susie Wilds herself, as we're saying, has also weighed in now.

16:26She's done it on X, saying, The article published earlier this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff and cabinet in history. Significant context, she says, was disregarded. Much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story. It was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team. I mean, to be honest, Anthony, when you read the whole article, it's quite long. It's in two sections. I'm not sure it does paint an entirely chaotic picture of the White House.

17:06It has her being very positive about Trump. And it does quote other people, including quite significant people, about the administration, saying it's all going very well. So I don't think it's fair. We're going to hear from Chris Whipple in a second, but I don't think it's quite fair to call it a hit piece. No, I don't think so. It kind of ticks through Donald Trump's first year in office, pegged on these times that he spoke with her and talking about what have been at times controversial policies that the president has implemented and crises, some self-made, some external, that the president has had to deal with.

17:42And, you know, you don't always pick things that will put the subject of your interview in the best light, but you try to do it in a way that accurately reflects what the person is saying. And she has not or the points where she has contested whether something was an accurate, an accurate statement of what she said, an accurate reflection of what she said. But Chris Whipple recorded all the interviews and he's played them and he has been vindicated. Everything that he quoted her saying, she said. OK, well, that's a very good introduction to the man himself because he's joining us now. Hello, Chris.

18:19Hey, how are you? I'm good, thanks. This is really good of you because you're going to be a busy man at the moment. It's been and it hasn't been dull. I can imagine not. Have you taken a few calls from a central Washington location? Not really. To be honest, they had their say, as you noticed, right after the piece came out. And I think they're going to leave it at that. I think that when you start hearing words like context and framing and disingenuous, it tells you one thing, and that is you've done your job, you've hit your target, because they haven't challenged a single assertion in the piece.

19:03And the reason for that is that they know it's all true and they know that it's all on tape. And that's why you're seeing what we used to call in the Watergate era, Ben Bradley, the famous Washington Post editor, would talk about the Nixon White House and its non-denials denials. That's what we've got here. So I guess the question, and someone posted this to me earlier today, and I wasn't quite sure what the answer is, why did Susie Wiles agree to do this interview? Why did she pull back the curtain for you? Normally, you don't see chiefs of staff talk like this on record while they're in office.

19:41Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary. Very rare. And I think that, you know, my experience, I wrote a book about the Biden White House and senior White House officials almost always speak on what they call deep background, requiring that quotations be approved before they're in print. This was quite the opposite. Susie Wiles was on the record from the get go and almost always on the record throughout the 11 months. It's extraordinary. And I can't read her mind or tell you exactly what her motivation was. But I can tell you what she said to me, which is that she felt that the Trump White House in its first incarnation was unfairly maligned by the media.

20:32That President Trump was vilified and that she was determined to try to get a fair hearing this time around. and I think she thought that I would give them a fair hearing. I mean, it's a fascinating study of all of these people and it lays bare, I suppose, in a way, some relationship strains that you would have known would be there. One of the really striking ones to me is she's pretty blunt about Pam Bondi and the whole Epstein thing, which obviously behind the scenes and frankly in front of the scenes, I suppose, as well, has gone pretty wrong for them. Yeah, it was pretty fraught And her whole account of the Epstein affair is fascinating, I think.

21:15Some readers may find it plausible and some may not. For example, when she says that she really completely underestimated the importance of it, the impact of it, of Trump's failure to turn over the files, to release the files, when he suggested during the campaign that he would. Some people may not believe that. She's a savvy political operator. She certainly should have known that that was important to large segments of Trump supporters. She also says at one point that I pressed her about the visit of Todd Blanche, the second in command of the Department of Justice and former Trump defense lawyer, when he went down and saw Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker, an Epstein confidant.

22:06Shortly thereafter, she winds up being moved to a less secure prison. And Susie Wiles told me that neither she nor Trump had known that this was going to happen and that the president was ticked off, as she put it. And it was fascinating to me, not only that, of course, but the fact that she talked about she's read the what she calls the Epstein file. And we talked about the contents. Yeah, there's something actually one of the most interesting quotes that you have in here from her is about Epstein, but it's about Trump's coalition, because it's something I've been thinking about, like the durability of Trump's coalition.

22:42And she tells you that the people who are really interested in this Epstein case are the new members of the Trump coalition. They're not MAGA faithful. They're ones who kind of Trump lured over at some point, and she wants to convert them from just Trump voters to Republican voters. These are the Joe Rogan listeners, she said, the people who are new to their world. I mean, it seems like she is thinking about this in a way that's bigger than just Jeffrey Epstein. She's thinking about the larger politics of all this. Yeah, no, I think that's true. She's really determined to try to maintain, to try to not to allow this MAGA coalition to splinter when Trump moves on, as she says he will after two terms.

23:30And that was also a newsworthy assertion by her. But she believes, and evidently J.D. Vance is particularly focused on these voters, the voters being this, there's this overlapping block of voters, as you pointed out, some of them, Joe Rogan listeners, younger members of newer members of the MAGA coalition who are angry about two things, Epstein and closiness with Israel, with Netanyahu. J.D. Vance is apparently focused on this group, and they need to figure out what to do about it. Did you get the impression from your conversation with Susie Wiles that it is a done deal that Vance runs for office in 2028, that Rubio accepts that or not?

24:20Well, I think that Vance, as you know, has been at least informally sort of anointed by Trump. Trump has floated the notion of a Vance-Rubio ticket in that order. And I did put the question to Rubio directly. I said, well, you know, any interest in competing for the nomination in 2028? And he said, no, if J.D. Vance runs, I'm going to support him. So I found that interesting. So Susie didn't anoint anyone, but I think she likes J.D. Vance, despite her comment about him being a conspiracy theorist and that his conversion to Trumpism was sort of political, in her words. On the psychological stuff, Chris, so that's the sort of politics of it.

25:10The psychological stuff is fascinating and her position, in a sense, her ability to say these things. So this business, we were talking a bit about this alcoholic personality thing that she obviously knows about because it's in her own family. And then Trump going on, I think it was the New York Post who's talking to subsequently and saying, yeah, I buy that about myself. I suppose it's a confirmation, isn't it, of things that we sense about Trump, that there is something disinhibited about it, something kind of driving him that is fascinating and in a sense unique. Yeah, it's this grandiose confidence in his abilities to do almost anything, untethered to reality, my words, not Susie's.

25:59But Susie would tell you that he has an alcoholic's personality, very much like her father when her father was inebriated, larger than life. And in fact, she has a Ph.D. in difficult men because she grew up the daughter of an alcoholic and staged interventions with her mother to get him into treatment. And then she went to work for a guy named Ron DeSantis, got him elected as governor of Florida. DeSantis then inexplicably turned on her for reasons she does not. She says she doesn't know to this day. History would have been very different if he hadn't, because she might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.

26:40She doesn't seem to like Elon Musk, though, or at least she doesn't seem to agree with some of the stuff he did when he came in and the level of disruption he had locking people out of their offices and all of that. Did that surprise you with her candor there or that she would take exception to him? Well, look, I was surprised by her candor from the beginning to the very end. And I give her credit for being unguarded and candid and freewheeling in these interviews. But yeah, it absolutely surprised me. Every interview I had with her, I was surprised by her candor. And that was a wild story of the evisceration of USAID by Musk when he came in like a kind of jacked up Nosferatu, to tearing stuff apart all night long and then sleeping in a sleeping bag in the executive office building by day.

27:35So it's a wild story. And of course, but not a funny story in this sense. It was a deadly serious story because when he eviscerated USAID, untold numbers of lives were put in jeopardy because immunizations in Africa were shut down. And she says, Susie said, she was aghast initially, and she worked hard behind the scenes to try to claw back the life-saving programs that were annihilated by Musk. Chris, we've got to let you go. It's so good of you to spend a bit of time with us, to have dropped in on AmeriCast and talk to our listeners right around the world. If people want to read the interview, which we thoroughly advise them to, it's on the Vanity Fair website now, isn't it?