US President Donald Trump said he was standing by his White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, after Vanity Fair magazine published interviews in which Wiles revealed internal tensions in Trump’s administration and painted an unflattering picture of the roles played by some of the president’s inner circle.
Trump, who regularly describes Wiles as the “most powerful woman in the world”, told the New York Post on Tuesday that he has full confidence in his chief of staff and that she had “done a fantastic job”.
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Vanity Fair published two articles based on the interviews, giving insights into what Wiles thinks about other key figures in Trump’s second presidency.
Speaking about Trump, Wiles described the teetotaling president as having “an alcoholic’s personality” and an eye for vengeance against perceived enemies.
“He has an alcoholic’s personality,” Wiles said of Trump, explaining that her upbringing with an alcoholic father prepared her for managing “big personalities”.
Trump does not drink, she noted, but operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing”.
In his defence of Wiles, Trump said she was right to describe him personally as having an “alcoholic’s personality”, even though he does not drink alcohol.
“I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic,” Trump said. “I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” he said.
Speaking on the Trump administration’s failure to quickly deliver its promise to share information related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Wiles suggested that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, had failed to clearly read the situation with the public.
“First, she gave them binders full of nothingness,” Wiles said of Bondi, noting that Vice President JD Vance had more fully grasped how important the issue was to some people, since he is himself “a conspiracy theorist”.
Of Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files, Wiles said, “We know he’s in the file”, but claimed the file did not show him doing “anything awful”.
Referring to other members of the Trump administration, Wiles called Russ Vought, the chief of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a “right-wing absolute zealot” and branded tech tycoon Elon Musk an “odd, odd duck”, Vanity Fair said.
On Ukraine, Wiles said that Trump believes Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants the whole country”, despite Washington’s push for a peace deal.
Wiles also affirmed that Trump wants to keep bombing alleged drug boats in the waters off the coast of Venezuela until that country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, “cries uncle”.
In a post on X, Wiles called the Vanity Fair story “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history”, saying it omitted important context and selectively quoted her to create a negative narrative.
Other members of Trump’s inner circle also defended Wiles after the articles were published.
Vance said in a speech in Pennsylvania that he and Wiles had “joked in private and in public” about him believing conspiracy theories.
“We have our disagreements, we agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States,” Vance said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters outside the West Wing that Wiles was “incredible” and accused Vanity Fair of the “bias of omission”, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on X that there was “absolutely nobody better!” than Wiles.