West Wing Instability — Straight From the Chief of Staff

Wiles goes off script and exposes the West Wing's fault lines. When a chief of staff starts talking like an ex chief of staff, the story isn't the quotes, it's the instability. According to the Times, Susie Wiles gave Vanity Fair Author Chris Whipple 11 interviews over the past year. Now, keep in mind, she's normally very, very tight lipped. She's not someone you see splashed out all over the media pretty much ever. She's certainly appeared to be someone who was very much a behind the scenes sort of person. You didn't see her on Fox News every five seconds the way you do others in this administration. But she gave 11 interviews on the record with Chris Whipple, with Vanity Fair. Not a particularly political media outlet, but certainly not a part of the right wing comfortable blanket bubble that would be expected to make her look good necessarily. Now, she offered unusually candid assessments of internal battles, rivalries and frustrations inside Trump world. After publication, Wiles called the article a disingenuously framed hit piece. Okay, I wonder where she learned that one from. But here's the interesting thing. She didn't dispute the authenticity of any of her quotes. Now, in the interviews, Wiles described the President as having, quote, an alcoholic's personality. Now, she wasn't saying he drank. She said he had the personality of an alcoholic. Reminded her of her own father, the famed sports commentator Pat Summerall, who was well documented to have been a, an alcoholic and difficult during her childhood. Wild said he operates with, quote, a view. There's nothing he can't do. Nothing, zero, nothing. She said she tried and failed to restrain him from giving January 6th pardons, tariffs and score settling, acknowledging that retribution sometimes played a role. Now, in some cases, it may look like retribution. She says, who could blame him? Not me. Okay, there are a lot of really, really damaging quotes in this story. Now, interesting to me. I mean, put my media trainer cap on her justification and her attack on Vanity Fair is that they quoted her out of context. It was a hit piece because it was quoted out of context. Well, well, that's the lamest accusation ever because guess what? Every single interview in the history of the world is quoted out of context. There's no other way of quoting somebody unless you take a quote out of the context of the conversation. Here's an example of a true out of context quote where someone could legitimately say, that's unfair, that really distorted the meaning. If she'd said, I'd have to be crazy to say that Donald Trump had an alcoholic's personality because he really has the personality of a sweet, cuddly college professor. And she's then only quoted as saying he has an alcoholic's personality. Okay, then you could say, hey, she has a fair point. She was quoted out of context in a way that distorted, but she's not making that allegation. I mean, some of the quotes here are just off the charts with the things she said about J.D. vance, calling him essentially a conspiracy nut. Rubio, all the, all the players. She called Russ Vote a zealot, said JD Vance is a conspiracy theorist. She described Elon Musk as an odd, odd duck. Do any of these things sound crazy to you? Don't sound crazy to me, but it's odd for a chief of staff to go on record saying these things. I, I don't know what she was thinking. Maybe she thought this reporter was just doing it on background, but she never actually said, here are the ground rules. This is only on background. Sometimes people that make that mistake. She said she's repeatedly told Trump, you can't say Bill Clinton went to Epstein Island. There's zero evidence that Bill Clinton ever went to Epstein Island. And she pointed out Trump doesn't care. He just, he's happy to repeat lie after lie after lie. She criticized Pam Bondi on the Epstein handling. I'd urge you to either look at the full story or at least read an extended excerpt of this story, because it's an, it's an excellent window into the mind of someone who's right there. I mean, she's with Trump pretty much every second of the day. She certainly spends a lot more time with him than Melania does. She's with him every minute of the day. So certainly when he's in the Oval Office and doing official business. So what are we to make of this? There's kind of a long tradition of White House insiders giving interviews that end up blowing up in their face. It wasn't that long ago in the first term, Anthony Scaramucci gave an extended interview with New Yorker magazine where he quoted, or he was quoted saying all kinds of attacks. Some of them have been a sexually explicit nature about other people who worked at the administration and, and top advisors to the President. That one was so egregious, even Trump said, okay, we got to get rid of this guy, and they fired him after 11 days. Now, so far, Susan Wiles does not seem to be, like, in a position where her head's going to be on the chopping block. Trump has initially put out signs he's supporting her. Others are supporting her. It also reminds me of those of you old enough to remember. David Stockman, a former congressman and the first budget director in the Reagan administration, had something similar happen where he gave an extended interview to the Atlantic Monthly and basically admitted, we don't know what's going on with the numbers here, with what we're doing. We're just chop, chop, chopping taxes. We don't know what's going to happen. This is trickle down economics. And he was allegedly sent to the woodshed where he was criticized by President Trump but was allowed to stay and by current metrics had a very lengthy tenure in that office, stayed in the administration until 1985. So sometimes people can weather the storm with these bad interviews where they're trashing everyone they work with. It does make things a little bit awkward. Rules for you, if you are in a highly sensitive position, whether you're the CEO of a company, you work in, a government realize a reporter may be someone you went to grade school with, may be your best friend. But unless you explicitly say, do we have an agreement that this is 100% off the record, assume anything interesting you say that makes the people around you look bad is going to be not only on the record, but in the story and quoted. And if you come back later and whine about, oh, you was, I was misquoted, I was quoted out of context, no one's going to believe you and you're not going to persuade anyone and you're going to have to deal with the political fallout. So Susan Wiles appears to be someone who really has the trust of the president and he finds her indispensable. So I guess she'll continue to be around for a while. But it does give you a sense of what people who work closely with these individuals really think of them. And it turns out it's exactly what a lot of the rest of us actually think about these characters. So, Susan Wiles, thanks for being honest. At least 11 times in the last year.