President Donald Trump's chief of staff and former campaign manager, Susie Wiles, spoke to Vanity Fair for an extensive piece where she revealed some of her own psychoanalysis of the GOP leader.
At one point during the interview, which involved a number of Trump staff members, Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality."
She explained that he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Trump's brother, Fred Trump Jr., was an alcoholic, and Trump doesn't drink alcohol at all. However Mary Trump, the president's niece, has said that for the president, "nothing is ever enough."
"This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism," Trump's niece, who has a degree in clinical psychology, said of Trump. "Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be."
Mary Trump wrote that her grandfather bullied his son, Fred Jr., into alcoholism.
Later in the Vanity Fair report, it explains that Wiles' father "was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment." He finally got sober and stayed there for the 21 years before his 2013 death.
"Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But 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.” Wiles said.