WASHINGTON: Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles said the US president had an “alcoholic’s personality” in an astonishing interview published Tuesday by Vanity Fair, which Wiles swiftly dismissed as a “hit piece.”
Wiles also called Vice President JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist,” tech tycoon Elon Musk an “odd duck,” and gave juicy opinions on other Trump administration figures in the lengthy piece.
Trump has previously described Wiles, the first female White House chief of staff, as the “ice maiden” and credited her for her role in driving forward his second presidency behind the scenes.
But the 68-year-old now finds herself firmly in the headlines after the Vanity Fair story, which the magazine said was based on a series of interviews with veteran political journalist Chris Whipple over the past year.
“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history,” Wiles said in her first X post in more than a year. “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she wrote, accusing the magazine of trying to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team.”
Vanity Fair quoted Wiles — whose own father, the NFL announcer Pat Summerall was an alcoholic — as saying that Trump, while a non-drinker, has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and “operates (with) a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
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