For years, President Trump’s 2024 campaign manager and now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had said next to nothing in public, and now we know why. There was apparently always a high risk she would make a complete fool out of herself, her boss, and, most offensively, all of his supporters.
On Tuesday Vanity Fair of all places published a feature centered on Wiles, with her willful participation in the piece: She agreed to more than 10 interviews with author Chris Whipple over the course of this year. What’s more, Vice President J.D. Vance and State Secretary Marco Rubio also gave interviews, and other top White House officials, including Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and adviser Stephen Miller, lent themselves to corny, The West Wing-style photoshoots.
Regardless of how this was going to turn out, why all of these people would voluntarily contribute to yet another publication that hates them and is hellbent on destroying this country is anyone’s guess. Trump himself continues to engage with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who has demonstrably lied about the president in the most appalling ways, so their conduct isn’t unheard of.
The more urgent problem at hand, though, isn’t just that Wiles did the interviews — it’s what she said in them. After the feature published, she released a shockingly amateurish statement about how “much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” as if it’s a great scandal that an antagonistic publication like Vanity Fair wouldn’t include all the times she called Trump amazing. But that doesn’t account for what was left in the feature, including comments from Wiles contradicting her boss, gossiping about her current and former White House associates, and openly musing about them having ulterior motives.
This is the person Trump refers to as “ice maiden,” which I thought was to suggest a certain steely self-possession rather than just a nickname for a fragile woman at risk of melting.
She has made the entire public question the sincerity and priorities of this administration and made it all the more difficult to defend a White House that, until now, was pretty easy to defend. By the way, all the accompanying pictures of Wiles and her peers were wildly unflattering, and if she has any enemies, she might consider recommending the photographer for their weddings.
Being silent worked for Wiles. She should go back to doing that.
