Donald Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” JD Vance has been “a proponent of conspiracy theories for a decade,” and Elon Musk is “a strange—very strange—bird.” The administration was also riven by “huge” internal disagreements over Washington’s so-called “liberation day” tariffs announced in April, which unsettled markets and were ultimately rolled back in part.
The assessments were delivered by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, in a high-profile interview with Vanity Fair published on Tuesday. The conversation was marked by an unusually hard-edged tone and featured blunt criticism of key figures within the administration.
Wiles’s remarks came against the backdrop of deteriorating approval ratings for Trump—most notably on the economy and inflation—and growing discontent within his own MAGA base, whose supporters argue that he has failed to deliver on promises made during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Wiles, a 68-year-old political consultant from Florida, served as Trump’s campaign manager last year. She is credited with having brought a measure of effectiveness—if not full order—to the campaign and, at times, to the workings of the White House itself.
“I’m something of an expert on big personalities,” Wiles said in the interview. She noted that she grew up with an alcoholic father and therefore, as she put it, recognizes similar character traits in Trump, even though the president does not drink alcohol. “He operates on the belief that nothing is impossible for him. Nothing, zero, absolutely nothing,” she said. While her portrayal of Trump was framed in relatively sympathetic terms, her assessments of Vance—the vice president and a presumed political heir to the Make America Great Again movement—were far harsher.
Speaking about pressure on Trump to release all materials related to the late sex trafficker and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles stressed that the issue carried particular weight for Vance, given that he had been “a proponent of conspiracy theories for a decade.” She also took aim at his sharp evolution from a Trump critic to one of his most energetic supporters, suggesting that the shift was calculated. “His conversion happened when he was running for the Senate,” Wiles said, referring to Vance’s successful 2022 campaign for Ohio’s seat in the upper chamber of Congress. “And I think that conversion was more, shall we say, political,” she added.
In the interview, Wiles also described Musk’s working style in the White House at the start of Trump’s second term, when the billionaire was tasked with sweeping cuts to government programmes and agencies. “It’s hard to keep up with Elon,” she said. “He openly uses ketamine. And during the day he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the Executive Office Building,” Wiles noted. “He’s a strange—very strange—bird, as geniuses often are, in my view. It’s not always comfortable, but that’s who he is.”
She said she was initially “shocked” when Musk moved to the effective dismantling of the US Agency for International Development. “I think anyone who follows how government works and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they were doing extremely important and valuable work,” Wiles said.
She acknowledged, however, that an even deeper rift within Trump’s team emerged over trade policy and the sweeping tariffs imposed in April on most US trading partners. In that dispute, hardliners prevailed, while other officials urged a more cautious approach. “There were huge disagreements over whether this was a good idea,” Wiles said. “It turned out to be more painful than I had expected.”
Later the same day, Wiles sought to blunt the impact of her remarks, calling the Vanity Fair interview “a dishonestly staged, commissioned piece against me and the greatest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history.” “After reading it, I concluded that it was designed to create an image of total chaos and a negative narrative around the president and our team,” she wrote on X. “None of this will stop our relentless effort to make America great again,” Wiles added.