Trump administration officials rallied around White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday after a Vanity Fair profile revealed sharp criticisms of key colleagues across a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
Across nearly a dozen interviews spanning most of 2025, Wiles told the magazine she disagreed with President Donald Trump’s pardoning of violent rioters who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage at the U.S. Capitol, his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs campaign and his prolonged efforts at “score settling” with political enemies, according to the article. She also delivered pointed assessments of top Trump world figures, calling Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot.” She also described Vice President JD Vance as a “a conspiracy theorist” and called Elon Musk “an avowed ketamine” user.
The extraordinary public defense that followed underscored Wiles’ unique position in an administration where loyalty battles frequently play out in public. Vance, Vought, Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt all issued statements in support of Wiles, who the president has called “Susie Trump” and credited with steering his 2024 victory.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Trump reiterated his support for Wiles in an interview with the New York Post. “She’s done a fantastic job,” he said. “I don’t read Vanity Fair,” he continued, but “from what I hear, the facts were wrong.”
After the piece was published, Wiles said “significant context was disregarded,” accusing author Chris Whipple — who has chronicled the tenures of many presidential chiefs of staff — of writing “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me.” She said the article was designed “to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
The defense of Wiles highlighted her unusual status in the Trump orbit. Unlike other Cabinet members who frequently appear on television, she has largely avoided the spotlight, giving few media interviews and maintaining relationships across the Republican establishment that have made her broadly popular among Trump allies.
The Vanity Fair interviews revealed potential tensions within the administration that have largely remained private. Wiles criticized Vance’s evolution from Trump critic to loyalist as “sort of political,” noting the transformation occurred “when he was running for the Senate,” and referred to him as “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” during a conversation about the contents of the so-called Epstein files. (For years prior to taking office, Vance raised questions about whether the government was hiding information about Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to powerful men.)
“There is no [Epstein] client list,” Wiles told the magazine, suggesting that Attorney General Bondi fumbled when she told Fox News earlier this year that such a document was sitting “on my desk,” and by giving a group of influencers “binders full of nothingness” that were labeled “The Epstein Files.”
In a post on X, Bondi called Wiles a “dear friend,” saying “any attempt to divide this administration will fail.”
Wiles also criticized the closure of the United States Agency for International Development, which was overseen by Musk as part of his cost-cutting efforts. “No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” she said, referring to the entity once tasked with offering global humanitarian aid. “[Musk] knew it would be horrifying to others, but he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Musk, she added, is “an odd, odd duck” and “an avowed ketamine” user, which the Tesla CEO has publicly acknowledged he has taken. When asked by Whipple about Musk sharing a post on X that compared public sector workers to murders under dictators, Wiles said, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing,” though she said she did not have first-hand knowledge.
Vance’s main takeaway from Vanity Fair’s two-part piece was simple, and a reflection of Trump’s combative relationship with the press.
“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,” Vance said during a stop in Pennsylvania.
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