White House chief of staff Susie Wiles broke the mold when she signed onto the hugely influential job. The first woman to hold the role, she’s also skillfully avoided making headlines during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. But that all changed with a pair of bombshell articles published Tuesday from Vanity Fair that shoved the reticent backstage player directly into the spotlight.
It’s true that Wiles has tamped down on the conniving and backbiting that characterized Trump’s first turn in the White House. She may even outlast the longest of the four(ish) chiefs that held the job during those years. But based on what she revealed over the course of her 11 on-the-record interviews with author Chris Whipple, her job survival depends on being exactly the enabler-in-chief that Trump has needed at his side.
Wiles herself disagrees with that moniker, but by her own admission, she hasn’t had any major confrontations with the president over weighty topics such as constitutional rights or a policy’s cost in human lives. (After the Vanity Fair articles were published, she denounced them in a statement as “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff and Cabinet in history.”)
She instead says the difficult conversations she’s had with Trump in her current role are “over little things, not big.” Wiles prefers to see herself as someone judicious in her pushback. “So no, I’m not an enabler,” she told Whipple. “I’m also not a b—-. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
It’s a responsibility that Wiles has been shirking, which is exactly as Trump prefers it.
The more immediate reviews of her job performance vary depending on who you ask. Vice President JD Vance told Whipple her predecessors’ “objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest.” Instead, he said, “her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.” Vance is at least partially right about how previous chiefs of staff have viewed their job — but deeply wrong in his analysis of what that means for Wiles’ efficacy in the job.
Often the last person in the room after an Oval Office meeting, the chief of staff can be a crucial final sounding board for a commander-in-chief. As many former occupants of the role told Whipple, who literally wrote the book on White House chiefs of staff, one of the gig’s main responsibilities comes down to challenging a president’s assumptions and providing honest counsel against potential disaster. It’s a responsibility that Wiles has been shirking, which is exactly as Trump prefers it.
A look back at Trump’s former chiefs shows how little he’s wanted someone willing to say “no.” His first, Reince Priebus, got swept up in the tidal wave of chaos that Trump encouraged around him. The longest-serving of them, John Kelly, was a more effective gatekeeper for information and access to Trump and worked to at least soften or slow-walk some of his boss’ more destructive tendencies. His unceremonious departure was a sign that Trump was no longer interested in being fettered.
The last two(ish) men to hold the job in that first term were ineffective in different ways. Mick Mulvaney was only ever allowed to serve as “acting” chief of staff. His infamous admission that there was effectively a quid pro quo at work during the Ukraine scandal ahead of Trump’s first impeachment meant his tenure would be brief. Mulvaney’s successor, former congressman Mark Meadows, was the exact kind of “yes man” that Trump wanted. But despite his apparent delusional self-aggrandization, he lacked the skillset and temperament required to be effective in managing either the disastrous Covid-19 pandemic response or Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election.
By contrast, Wiles has a reputation as a clear-eyed political operative, bringing little drama or intrigue among her staff. She has no need to constrain or overrule her underlings, nor is there any question that when she speaks, she’s channeling Trump’s authority, something even Secretary of State Marco Rubio can’t easily claim in meetings with heads of state. There’s also very little ambition on display from her, a factor that keeps her from raising hackles among a crew of, as one of her deputies put it to Whipple, “junkyard dogs.”
But when it comes to the president’s policies and their consequences, Wiles is pliable to the point of becoming insubstantial. There appears to be no point where she wouldn’t cede to the president’s will. There are no examples across the two Vanity Fair articles of her successfully convincing Trump to change course — except for when he almost fired her from her role as Florida co-chair during the 2016 campaign.
A certain level of indifferent amorality is on display from Wiles throughout her conversations with Whipple.
Over the course of a year, Whipple tracks the ways that Wiles has, as she put it, “got on board” with Trump’s worst policies. The decision to pardon all 1,500 Jan. 6 convictions, the president’s ongoing vengeance campaign against his perceived enemies, the reckless bid to roll out a set of half-baked tariffs — all are framed as instances where Wiles offered the mildest pushback before ultimately getting with Trump’s program.
A certain level of indifferent amorality is on display from Wiles throughout her conversations with Whipple. On the rapid dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development under Elon Musk, her complaints are more about the process than the deadly outcome for thousands of foreign aid recipients. On the mass deportations that her most powerful deputy, Stephen Miller, is overseeing — even with reports of U.S. citizens being caught up in the sweeps — the most she could muster was that “our process has to lean toward a double-check.” And she stands by the string of military strikes against alleged drug smugglers’ boats, despite agreeing with Whipple when he noted that smuggling is not a death-penalty offense. There’s no moment where she’s described as grappling with the repercussions, only a detached willingness to make Trump’s agenda a reality.
When Wiles was first tapped to be chief of staff last year, I wrote that it was “something of a cursed reward for Wiles’ loyalty throughout the campaign” and wondered if she’d survive in the role. The answer is a much more resounding “yes” than I’d expected. She told Whipple that she’d initially meant to stay for six months, the same as Priebus. Instead, she might outlast Kelly’s 16-month tenure.
But given that my concerns were mostly centered around when and where Wiles would choose to draw a line in the sand against Trump’s authoritarianism, her ability to thrive as chief of staff then is less a testament to her skills than her willingness to keep her head down and say “yes” to whatever her boss says.
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