The Wiles interviews aren't mysterious — they're just damning

I confess to believing something was afoot when I first heard about Susie Wiles’ interviews with Vanity Fair. The White House chief of staff had savaged JD Vance (“a conspiracy theorist for a decade”); Elon Musk (“an avowed ketamine” user); Russ Vought (“a right-wing absolute zealot”); and Pam Bondi (“completely whiffed” the Epstein files.)

Her boss has not been above 50 percent in approval for the last two hundred and twenty-eight days, according to CNN’s pollster. To turn that around, I thought someone inside the regime was going to take a fall. My thinking about Wiles’ comments was like that of others: Something’s going on. There must be more than meets the eye here.

But then I read a series of comments by historian Seth Cotlar. He reminded me that sometimes what you see is actually what you get. “I think there's no point looking for a 14-dimensional chess explanation for what anyone is doing,” Seth wrote. “I don't think Wiles is a savvy operator playing a Vanity Fair journalist to advance her own interests. I think she's a damaged person enabling other damaged people.”

Think about it. It is not normal for the White House chief of staff to say that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.” It is not normal for the president himself to say, yeah, so what if I do? Here’s the AP: Donald Trump “agreed that he does have the personality of an alcoholic, describing himself as having ‘a very possessive personality.’”

These things are so not normal that the rest of us don’t know what to make of them, and because we don’t, our minds fly off in search of unifying theories that explain the abnormality. Indeed, we regard the White House’s reaction to the interview – “a hit piece” – as evidence of suspicions held all along. Something’s going on behind the scenes.

But as Seth said in a follow-up interview with me, if it looks chaotic, it likely is. Wiles’ comments were extreme. The official reaction was extreme. Utter chaos. There are no anchoring principles, no moral guideposts, no concept of national interest, no sense of the common good. It’s just mindless impulse and rationalizations after the fact.

“Ultimately, I think this [Vanity Fair] interview is about Wiles trying to normalize something that she knows is profoundly abnormal,” Seth told me Wednesday. “That's why people in Trump's orbit are rallying around her, because they also want this to just look like ‘normal political infighting’ to the public. Lincoln had his team of rivals, and Trump has Marco and JD battling it out. Nothing to see here!”

Susie Wiles seemed like she was telling on the people she works with. Then, when she saw the reaction to the Vanity Fair interview, she walked it back, the suggestion being that she knew what she did and wanted to control the damage. What's really going on here?

My guess would be that Wiles thought she was doing something that many past chiefs of staff have done – go on the record with a journalist in real time and offer an honest, insider view of what's happening in the White House. It's a very normal thing in our political culture, and historians often find such interviews quite valuable in trying to understand the workings of past administrations.

To me, one of the markedly strange aspects of this whole episode is that Wiles seems to think of herself as engaging in regular old American politics that's no different from the 1980s era Republicanism that she was socialized into. Just like past chiefs of staff would leak to the press and then go through the ritual of saying they were quoted out of context, her back tracking feels like regular DC insider theater.

The fact that so many people in Trump's orbit have rushed to her defense would suggest that they also are trying to spin this as just part of the regular old game of politics. Nothing to see here.

I thought her description of Trump as having an "alcoholic's personality" was insightful. She seemed to understand his endless need -- if not for alcohol, as such, then for something else. Power, attention, I would suggest even love. What's your take on that?

Yes, that to me was probably the most important. She said this as someone who grew up as the child of a rich, famous, charismatic alcoholic of a father, sports broadcaster Pat Summerall. She seems to be positioning herself as the responsible one who can tame and channel the wild and unpredictable energies of a powerful father figure, in this case the president, rather than the head of a household.

Rather than confront that powerful figure who is unable to control himself and who regularly engages in behavior that is damaging to the people around him, she makes excuses for that behavior and does things behind the scenes to try to clean up messes he might create.

Rather than confront head-on the fact that, as she put it, Trump (like a drunk on a bender) thinks that there's nothing he can't do, she wants us to believe (and perhaps also wants herself to believe) that deep down he's a good person who really does care for people, even though he might be doing harmful things in the short term.

There is a note of fatalism in the interview, as if she herself were somehow trapped in a house of horrors. At the same time, she appears to be accepting of that reality, even doing her part to rationalize criminal conduct and make it seem normal. Thoughts?

Wiles embodies two quite different threads of Republicanism that have come down from the Reagan era. I think, as someone who worked for New York Congressman) Jack Kemp in the 70s, she's probably on board with the sort of destructive, anti-government extremism we would associate with Russ Vought (who Wiles basically called a wild-eyed extremist). But she also was the campaign manager for John Huntsman in 2012 (an old school Bush-type moderate) and was around when James Baker was running Reagan's White House.

So she's inherited both a mature institutionalism, and a wild-eyed anti-government extremism that have been part of the GOP coalition since her childhood. But I don't get the sense that Wiles has the self-awareness to know this, and so she simultaneously presents herself as the grown-up in the room and someone who thinks utter lunatics like Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr are doing a great job of taking down "the deep state."

My sense is that she rationalizes this to herself by saying that "the people voted for this, so what's a Republican operative like me to do other than help it get done as best as I can?"

In sum, where there used to be at least some Republicans whose politics flowed from a set of small-I liberal principles that took governance seriously as a complicated manner, Wiles just seems like an operative without any sense of morality of "the common good" that might put limits on what she will do or support.

You stole my thunder a bit. She seems to judge the goodness or badness of choices based on the reaction, especially from Trump's enemies. There's no there there, as we used to say. There's no sense of the common good. Explain why that's a problem for America.

It's incredibly corrosive to an aspirationally democratic society when politics becomes solely about power and defeating one's internal "enemies." That's Trump's approach to politics and always has been, and Wiles has just accommodated herself to that.

Say what you will about Jack Kemp or Ronald Reagan, but they genuinely believed that their policies would be good for all Americans, and they wanted other Americans to be persuaded by the case they were making.

Wiles is working for a party that has given up on persuasion and given up on any vision of "the common good."

In that sense, she is 100 percent a creature of the Trump era, but I also understand why there's a shred of integrity somewhere inside of her that wants to believe she's just playing James Baker to Trump's Reagan, rather than playing a role in dismantling the constitutional order.

Ultimately, I think this interview is about Wiles trying to normalize something that she knows is profoundly abnormal.

That's why people in Trump's orbit are rallying around her, because they also want this to just look like "normal political infighting" to the public. Lincoln had his team of rivals, and Trump has Marco and JD battling it out. Nothing to see here!

But despite her efforts to show how "normal" this all is, she still lets slip all sorts of comments that indicate that she recognizes how bonkers DOGE cuts were, what a conspiracy theorist JD is, etc.

Americans are habituated to believe that there's some kind of reality happening behind the veil of appearances. In this case, there's talk about what Wiles is really up to. Is she trying to find someone to blame for Trump's failures? etc etc. You have said we should drop that pretense in order to see with clear eyes. Why?

Political actors often have complicated and hidden motives, but the idea that Wiles has the capacity to successfully pull off 14-dimensional chess maneuvers via interviews with journalists strikes me as implausible.

Conspiracy theories always presume far too much intelligence, ability to coordinate, and ability to maintain secrecy on the part of the supposed conspirators. The journalist who wrote up this interview spoke with Wiles for many hours and also interviewed many other people. Perhaps he got manipulated, but I don't think we should assume that without evidence to back that up.

The impression Wiles gives off in this interview is that she's a fairly simplistic person who is just keeping her head down and trying to help Trump realize his vision for the country that the American people voted for. She tells herself that some bad things might happen along the way, but that's been a part of every past administration. No one's perfect. Every administration has its internal divisions and conflicts, and this one's no different.

To my mind, that's the Occam's Razor way of looking at these interviews. This is an exceptionally amoral chief of staff's reflections on what's happening inside the authoritarian White House that she wants to convince herself and the country is just doing politics as usual.