Trump’s chief of staff criticizes JD Vance, Pam Bondi in Vanity Fair interview

Joy Malbon reports on Vanity Fair article, where Susie Wiles, President Trump's Chief of Staff, pulls no punches in criticizing the current administration.

It’s an incredible peek behind the curtain of power, a bombshell read that is setting group chats in Washington, D.C. on fire.

Vanity Fair released a feature Monday on Susie Wiles, U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful voices in Washington, who famously shuns the public spotlight.

Wiles, during 11 interviews Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple, provided her perspective of Trump’s return to the White House and what she thinks about his cabinet in a candid – and sometimes critical – portrait of the Trump administration.

In the two-part piece, Wiles pulls no punches on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the suspected drug boat strikes in Venezuela and what the Trump administration is really after, and of course, the president himself.

‘An alcoholic’s personality’

Wiles was full of praise for the amazing comeback of Trump in his second term, which she helped orchestrate, but describes Trump’s personality in an odd way, saying the president has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and that “he operates (with) a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

The description raised some eyebrows, considering Trump is famously a teetotaler, someone who doesn’t drink.

Wiles spoke about how she has lost battles with her volatile boss. For example, she tried to get him to back off pardoning hundreds of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block Joe Biden’s 2020 U.S. presidential election. Despite urging him not to pardon the most violent offenders, Trump did anyway.

She also advised him to hold off on the hefty tariffs in the spring – Trump’s so called “Liberation Day” – because of a ‘huge disagreement" among his team. Trump went ahead anyway.

Wiles said she also worried about the president’s attempt to “settle scores” with his perceived political enemies, like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A U.S. federal judge dismissed both cases.

Wiles said some of the prosecutions were driven by Trump’s desire for payback, but she also defended the president.

“In some cases, it may look like retribution ... Who would blame him? Not me,” she said.

On Trump’s inner circle

On JD Vance, Wiles describes the U.S. vice-president as a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” who’s conversion from a “Never Trumper” to MAGA “was sort of political” and driven by ambition.

Wiles called Trump’s billionaire buddy Elon Musk, who took a wrecking ball to U.S. federal agencies and departments, “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are.” She also said Musk was “an avowed” ketamine user who often slept in a sleeping bag in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Wiles did not approve of Musk gutting the U.S. Agency for International development, saying she was “aghast” and that foreign aid workers “do very good work.”

On the Epstein files, Wiles acknowledges that Trump, who had a long relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is in the files, but said there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

“He’s not doing anything awful,” she said. “They were, you know, sort of young ... single playboys together.”

However, the Washington insider took a swing at U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi for not recognizing how deeply Trump supporters felt about the Epstein scandal, demanding the truth come out.

“I think she (Bondi) completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” she said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

Another headline catching revelation: Those Venezuelan drug boat strikes the U.S. military have been targeting at Trump’s orders. The president insists his goal is to stop the “narco terrorists,” but Wiles said the real goal seems to be regime change, forcing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro out.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

While these bombshell revelations have tongues wagging in Washington, Wiles slapped back on social media, calling the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff and cabinet in history.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also slammed the reporter, calling it “fake news.”

“This is, unfortunately, another example of disingenuous reporting, where you have a reporter who took the chief of staff’s words wildly out of context.”

However, it’s important to note that neither Wiles or Leavitt took issue with the facts in the article.