{"id":352648,"date":"2025-12-16T22:50:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T22:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/352648\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T22:50:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T22:50:08","slug":"trumps-chief-of-staff-says-he-believes-theres-nothing-he-cant-do-as-president-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/352648\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s chief of staff says he believes \u2018there\u2019s nothing he can\u2019t do\u2019 as president | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump<\/a> believes \u201cthere\u2019s nothing he can\u2019t do, nothing, zero\u201d as US president, the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said in a rare interview<\/a> that shines an unvarnished spotlight on his second administration.<\/p>\n

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Wiles described Trump \u2013 who is teetotal \u2013 as having \u201can alcoholic\u2019s personality\u201d, an insight she ascribed to her relationship with her late father, the broadcaster and NFL star Pat Summerall, who had alcoholism.<\/p>\n

\u201cHigh-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I\u2019m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,\u201d Wiles said in a series of 11 interviews she gave to the author Chris Whipple.<\/p>\n

In a series of strikingly unguarded comments even before Trump returned to the presidency, Wiles said that Trump will pursue retribution against his political opponents when he sees an \u201copportunity\u201d and said she forged a \u201cloose agreement\u201d with him to finish score-settling with adversaries by the first 90 days of his administration.<\/p>\n

But the president did not stick to it. Indictments have been served more than six months into his presidency on the New York attorney general, Letitia James<\/a>, who won a civil action against Trump for business fraud, and the former FBI director, James Comey<\/a>, whom Trump fired during his first presidency.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some cases, it may look like retribution,\u201d Wiles said. \u201cAnd there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think he wakes up thinking about retribution,\u201d she said of Trump. \u201cBut when there\u2019s an opportunity, he will go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a social media post on Tuesday morning, Wiles said that \u201csignificant context was disregarded\u201d in the Vanity Fair piece.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Then in an interview with the New York Post, Trump stood behind Wiles. \u201cNo, she meant that I\u2019m \u2013 you see, I don\u2019t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that \u2013 but I\u2019ve often said that if I did, I\u2019d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic,\u201d he said. \u201cI have said that many times about myself, I do. It\u2019s a very possessive personality.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he hadn\u2019t read the interview, but \u201cthe facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the interview, Wiles also said she had warned Trump against pardoning all 1,500 rioters involved in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, when a mob trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden\u2019s victory in the previous presidential election stormed the US Capitol.<\/p>\n

She acknowledged that the FBI did \u201can incredible job\u201d in establishing who was guilty of what \u2013 a declaration at odds with Trump\u2019s pursuit of vengeance against agents who were instrumental in the investigation, several of whom have been fired.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn\u2019t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But Trump argued \u2013 against evidence to the contrary \u2013 that even violent offenders had been given disproportionately heavy sentences, so she relented.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Wiles expressed strong misgivings about the personality and actions of the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk<\/a>, who pioneered the unofficial department of government efficiency (Doge) dedicated to slashing bureaucracy, and was especially critical of its dismantling of USAID, the government overseas development body.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody,\u201d she said, crediting the agency with \u201cvery good work\u201d.<\/p>\n

She called Musk \u201can odd, odd duck\u201d and said she was \u201cinitially aghast\u201d at his approach.<\/p>\n

After the SpaceX and Tesla owner shared a social media post saying Stalin, Mao and Hitler did not murder millions, but that their public sector workers did, Wiles put it down to his drug use, saying: \u201cI think that\u2019s when he\u2019s microdosing.\u201d Asked to elaborate, she said: \u201cHe\u2019s an avowed ketamine [user].\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiles also criticised Pam Bondi<\/a>, the attorney general, for mishandling the Epstein files, relating to the disgraced late financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>, which has threatened to open a chasm between Trump and his Maga followers.<\/p>\n

She acknowledged that Trump was in the files but, she said, \u201cnot [for] doing anything awful\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of Bondi, she said: \u201cI think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this. First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn\u2019t on her desk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bondi and Musk have not publicly responded to the Vanity Fair articles.<\/p>\n

On Trump\u2019s signature immigrant deportation scheme \u2013 which has drawn criticism for mass round ups of people who have not committed crimes, in contrast with pre-election promises to deport \u201cthe worst of the worst\u201d \u2013 Wiles admitted disquiet, saying \u201cwe\u2019ve got to look harder at our process for deportation\u201d.<\/p>\n

While many of Trump\u2019s cabinet picks \u2013 including the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, and Kristi Noem<\/a>, the homeland security secretary \u2013 have been criticised as unqualified, Wiles described them as \u201ca world-class cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of\u201d. She characterized them as \u201cdisrupters\u201d tailor-made to tackle \u201cthe deep state\u201d.<\/p>\n

She called Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary criticised by opponents for embracing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, \u201cmy Bobby\u201d and \u201cquirky Bobby\u201d, while praising him for shaking up the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n

She appeared less complimentary about the vice president, JD Vance<\/a>, whom she said has been \u201ca conspiracy theorist for a decade\u201d and whose conversion from vehement anti-Trumper to Maga diehard she described as \u201csort of political\u201d.<\/p>\n

Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget \u2013 and a key architect of the Project 2025 blueprint that has guided much of Trump\u2019s second presidency \u2013 she described as \u201can absolute rightwing zealot\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump believes \u201cthere\u2019s nothing he can\u2019t do, nothing, zero\u201d as US president, the White House chief of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-352648","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}