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When Susie Wiles agreed to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff, one of the first things she did was huddle with former chiefs to get their advice. Reportedly, they told her one thing she should definitely not do was talk to Chris Whipple.

Fortunately for all of us, Wiles did not take their advice. Whipple, a well-respected reporter and author of the 2017 classic “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” is known as the walking encyclopedia of chiefs of staff. But Wiles not only agreed to talk with him, she gave him 11 interviews over the last 11 months – every one of them, as she agreed, recorded on tape – and revealed by Whipple in this month’s Vanity Fair. It’s worth subscribing to, just to read the whole article.

All I can say is: Thank you, Susie! For me, it’s the first present under the Christmas tree. Just in time for the holidays, Susie Wiles has given us all a gift: a peek behind the curtain into the personalities and workings of the Trump White House. And it ain’t pretty.

While Wiles continues to profess her loyalty to the Trump team, she proceeds to dump on the whole bunch of them, starting with the president himself. Initially, she recounts, Trump agreed to limit retaliation against his perceived political enemies to his first 90 days in office. Promise broken. With the total cooperation of Attorney General Pam Bondi (more later), he’s still busy at score-settling.

About January 6, Wiles told Whipple she tried to persuade Trump to pardon only those who just wandered into the Capitol without engaging in any violence, and certainly not those who were seen on camera assaulting police officers. Trump refused. He insisted on pardoning the whole lot.

Surprisingly, Wiles also admitted she believed Trump’s tariffs were more harmful than he would admit, suggested his anti-immigration crusade had gone too far and said Trump was dead wrong when he claimed that Bill Clinton had once visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Asked to describe what it was like being so close to Trump, Wiles told Whipple it was like working for someone with an “alcoholic’s personality” – which Trump immediately said he considered a compliment. Really? Medical experts list the following personality traits of an alcoholic: self-centeredness (prioritizing personal needs); impulsiveness (difficulty controlling urges); manipulativeness (use of deceitful tactics); emotional instability (exaggerated emotional reactions); defensiveness (irritable when confronted); and perfectionism (unrealistic self-expectations).

That may define Trump to a “t,” but only in Trump’s world would that be considered a compliment.

After undermining the image of Trump himself, Wiles proceeded to belittle many of those around him. She put down Vice President JD Vance as a “calculating conspiracy theorist,” dismissed HHS Secretary RFK Jr. as “quirky Bobby,” called OMB Director Russell Vought a “right-wing absolute zealot,” and dismissed one-time Trump pal Elon Musk as an “odd, odd duck” and “avowed ketamine user.”

Among Cabinet members, most of Wile’s scorn was directed against AG Pam Bondi for her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, starting with Bondi’s distributing binders about Epstein to a group of social media influencers at the White House in February. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “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.”

For me, the most stunning quote in the interviews was Wiles description of her own job. “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that,” Wiles told Whipple. WTF? If that’s not her job, what is her job?

Upon publication, in true Trumpian fashion, Wiles attacked the Vanity Fair article as a “hit piece.” But nobody believes her. She agreed to the interviews. Every one of them was taped. And the White House has not cited one case where she was misquoted.

Unwittingly, perhaps, Susie Wiles has performed a valuable public service. She has confirmed our worst beliefs in how bad things really are in the White House. The United States is led today by a bunch of amateurs, not one of whom, starting with Donald Trump, is qualified for the job they hold. God save the Republic!

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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