{"id":72775,"date":"2025-12-16T23:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T23:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/72775\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T23:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T23:21:08","slug":"exclusive-trump-stands-by-chief-of-staff-susie-wiles-after-bombshell-vanity-fair-interviews-admits-he-has-alcoholics-personality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/72775\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive | Trump stands by chief of staff Susie Wiles after bombshell Vanity Fair interviews \u2014 admits he has ‘alcoholic’s personality’"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump defended\u00a0White House chief of staff Susie Wiles<\/a>\u00a0in an exclusive interview with The Post Tuesday \u2014 saying she was right to tell Vanity Fair\u00a0he has an \u201calcoholic\u2019s personality\u201d\u00a0<\/a>and that he has confidence in\u00a0Wiles to continue in her role<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an afternoon phone call, Trump said that he wasn\u2019t offended by his subordinate\u2019s word choice.<\/p>\n

Follow The Post\u2019s live coverage of President Trump and national politics for the latest news and analysis<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNo, she meant that I\u2019m \u2014 you see, I don\u2019t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that \u2014 but I\u2019ve often said that if I did, I\u2019d have a very good chance of being an\u00a0alcoholic<\/a>. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It\u2019s a very possessive personality,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

President Trump defended White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in an exclusive interview with The Post Tuesday \u2014 saying she was right to tell Vanity Fair he has an \u201calcoholic\u2019s personality\u201d and that he has full faith in Wiles to continue in her role. REUTERS<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve said that many times about myself. I\u2019m fortunate I\u2019m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I\u2019ve said that \u2014 what\u2019s the word? Not possessive \u2014 possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I\u2019ve said it many times, many times before.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the profile,\u00a0Wiles \u2014 the daughter of late NFL player and broadcaster Pat Summerall, who underwent his own public struggles with the bottle \u2014 told author Chris Whipple: \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<\/p>\n

Over the course of 11 conversations this year, Wiles also told Whipple that Vice President JD Vance was \u201ca conspiracy theorist for a decade\u201d and said Attorney General Pam Bondi \u201cwhiffed\u201d in her handling of files related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t read it, but I don\u2019t read Vanity Fair \u2014 but she\u2019s done a fantastic job,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Trump said Tuesday when asked about the report by Whipple, best known for his 2017 book \u201cThe Gatekeepers\u201d about White House chiefs of staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked if he had full confidence in Wiles, the president said: \u201cOh, she\u2019s fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that he thought Whipple may have deceived Wiles regarding his focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, deceived \u2014 and he didn\u2019t have great access, a couple of very short interviews. And Susie generally doesn\u2019t do interviews,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf anybody knows the interviewer, and if they know Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is a totally \u2014 it\u2019s lost its way. It\u2019s also lost its readers, as you know. No, she\u2019s fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump, 79, reiterated that he avoids alcohol, saying in the interview he has a \u201cpossessive and addictive type personality\u201d and that he wasn\u2019t offended by her word choice. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Wiles is widely admired by insiders for quietly resolving rifts among officials, avoiding the persistent in-fighting that plagued Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Wiles told The Post in\u00a0an April interview<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cI want him to have more inputs, not less, more information, not less, more people talking to him, not fewer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI view my responsibility as making sure he gets unvarnished information and complete truth,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd however many people it takes to get there, and whoever they are \u2014 of course, within reason. We actually encourage it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Vance: \u2018Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the interview, Wiles said: \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 AP<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I am a conspiracy theorist,\u201d Vance said while taking reporter questions in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true \u2014 and by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vance said \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance quipped, \u201cit turns out that a conspiracy theory is just \u201csomething that was true six months before the media admitted it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bondi also toed the line for Wiles, calling her a \u201cdear friend\u201d who \u201cfights every day to advance President Trump\u2019s agenda \u2013 and she does so with grace, loyalty, and historic effectiveness.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny attempt to divide this administration will fail,\u201d Bondi added in the statement on X. \u201cAny attempt to undermine and downplay President Trump\u2019s monumental achievements will fail. We are family.\u201d<\/p>\n

White House budget director Russell Vought, whom\u00a0Wiles called \u201ca right-wing absolute zealot,\u201d\u00a0tweeted<\/a>: \u201cSusie Wiles is an exceptional chief of staff\u2026 In my portfolio, she is always an ally in helping me deliver for the president. And this hit piece will not slow us down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vought, a rare holdover from Trump\u2019s first term, said the administration \u201chas never worked this well or been more oriented towards accomplishing what [Trump] wants to accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiles responded Tuesday morning on X that the article was \u201ca disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSignificant 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,\u201d she went on.<\/p>\n

Trump thinks Putin \u2018wants the whole\u2019 of Ukraine<\/p>\n

Wiles also is quoted sharing Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,\u201d Wiles told me in August.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump publicly has expressed optimism about peace talks, which he at one point suggested he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Wiles said that \u201con the phone calls that we\u2019ve had with Putin, it\u2019s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump did not address the Vanity Fair profile on his Truth Social account as of Tuesday evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, he announced that he was going to give a rare Oval Office address in primetime Wednesday to tout his administration\u2019s record.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I\u2019ll be talking about where we came from, from four years of that of the worst administration in history \u2014 it was the worst administration in history \u2014 to where we are now, where we\u2019re doing very well, and where we\u2019re going,\u201d Trump told The Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump defended\u00a0White House chief of staff Susie Wiles\u00a0in an exclusive interview with The Post Tuesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[153,9,11,10,87,58,23310,5561],"class_list":{"0":"post-72775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-us-news","14":"tag-vanity-fair","15":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}