WASHINGTON — President Trump defended White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in an exclusive interview with The Post Tuesday — saying she was right to tell Vanity Fair he has an “alcoholic’s personality” and that he has confidence in Wiles to continue in her role.
In an afternoon phone call, Trump said that he wasn’t offended by his subordinate’s word choice.
“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said, a teetotaler who has frequently cited the 1981 death of his older brother Fred at age 42 of an alcohol-induced heart attack as the main impetus for his abstinence.
President Trump defended White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in an exclusive interview with The Post Tuesday — saying she was right to tell Vanity Fair he has an “alcoholic’s personality” and that he has full faith in Wiles to continue in her role. REUTERS
“I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.”
In the profile, Wiles — the daughter of late NFL player and broadcaster Pat Summerall, who underwent his own public struggles with the bottle — told author Chris Whipple: “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
Over the course of 11 conversations this year, Wiles also told Whipple that Vice President JD Vance was “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and said Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” in her handling of files related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair — but she’s done a fantastic job,” Trump said Tuesday when asked about the report by Whipple, best known for his 2017 book “The Gatekeepers” about White House chiefs of staff.
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.”
Asked if he had full confidence in Wiles, the president said: “Oh, she’s fantastic.”
He said that he thought Whipple may have deceived Wiles regarding his focus.
“Yeah, deceived — and he didn’t have great access, a couple of very short interviews. And Susie generally doesn’t do interviews,” Trump said.
“If anybody knows the interviewer, and if they know Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is a totally — it’s lost its way. It’s also lost its readers, as you know. No, she’s fantastic.”
Trump, 79, reiterated that he avoids alcohol, saying in the interview he has a “possessive and addictive type personality” and that he wasn’t offended by her word choice. AFP via Getty Images
Wiles is widely admired by insiders for quietly resolving rifts among officials, avoiding the persistent in-fighting that plagued Trump’s first term.
She also has taken a starkly different view of her role than her first-term predecessors who sought to control access to Trump while presiding over ceaseless palace intrigue.
Wiles told The Post in an April interview that “I want him to have more inputs, not less, more information, not less, more people talking to him, not fewer.”
“I view my responsibility as making sure he gets unvarnished information and complete truth,” she said. “And however many people it takes to get there, and whoever they are — of course, within reason. We actually encourage it.”
Trump loyalists praise Wiles frequently in contrast to first-term chief of staff John Kelly, who later turned into a strident critic of the president after slow-walking and resisting his orders between 2017 and 2019.
Vance: ‘Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist
The surprisingly candid assessments from Wiles initially drew shock across Washington, but administration officials quickly rallied around her, including Vance, who like Trump admitted there was truth in her least-flattering words.
In the interview, Wiles said: “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” AP
“Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist,” Vance said while taking reporter questions in Pennsylvania.
“But I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true — and by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time.”
Vance said “I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask 3-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic and that we should actually let them develop some language skills.”
“I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job. And I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail, rather than win an argument against his political opponents.”
Vance quipped, “it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just “something that was true six months before the media admitted it.”
Bondi also toed the line for Wiles, calling her a “dear friend” who “fights every day to advance President Trump’s agenda – and she does so with grace, loyalty, and historic effectiveness.
“Any attempt to divide this administration will fail,” Bondi added in the statement on X. “Any attempt to undermine and downplay President Trump’s monumental achievements will fail. We are family.”
White House budget director Russell Vought, whom Wiles called “a right-wing absolute zealot,” tweeted: “Susie Wiles is an exceptional chief of staff… In my portfolio, she is always an ally in helping me deliver for the president. And this hit piece will not slow us down.”
Vought, a rare holdover from Trump’s first term, said the administration “has never worked this well or been more oriented towards accomplishing what [Trump] wants to accomplish.”
Wiles responded Tuesday morning on X that the article was “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” she went on.
Trump thinks Putin ‘wants the whole’ of Ukraine
Wiles also is quoted sharing Trump’s private assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin is gumming up peace talks to end his nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine because he still wants to conquer the whole country.
“The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August.
“Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.”
Trump publicly has expressed optimism about peace talks, which he at one point suggested he’d quickly end. He left an August summit with the Russian leader voicing confidence in a proposed European-led peacekeeping force deploying after the possible transfer of Donetsk.
Wiles said that “on the phone calls that we’ve had with Putin, it’s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.”
Trump did not address the Vanity Fair profile on his Truth Social account as of Tuesday evening.
Instead, he announced that he was going to give a rare Oval Office address in primetime Wednesday to tout his administration’s record.
“It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” he wrote.
“I think I’ll be talking about where we came from, from four years of that of the worst administration in history — it was the worst administration in history — to where we are now, where we’re doing very well, and where we’re going,” Trump told The Post.