Vanity Fair has
published a two-part
story based on interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. The Trump White House is full of absolute monsters -- the president himself as well as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, among others -- and it's generally conceded that Wiles is not one of those monsters. But like many of the other non-sociopaths who fill out the administration -- think Marco Rubio, for instance -- she won't choose morals or principles when they conflict with her ambition. She might have twinges of conscience, and they might explain why she's been talking to the author of the
Vanity Fair piece, Chris Whipple, since the 2024 campaign. Or it might be that she wants to resign soon -- presidential chiefs of staff don't usually stay in the job very long -- and use this controversial profile as a pitch for a high-dollar memoir deal or a lucrative, low-stress TV gig.
In any case, she's never acted on any of her qualms about Trump in a serious way. If this profile is how she lets the world know that she thinks the Trump administration has done some reprehensible things, then she's a
Uvalde cop, someone who dithered while bad things were done, apparently determined to save her own neck. She portrays this as a matter of job philosophy,
according to J.D. Vance:
Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
So she expresses her qualms, then shrugs and goes back to work.
... Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)
Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’”
“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In 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.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
You can argue that this wasn't a good enough reason for Wiles to fall on her sword -- no one was directly harmed by these pardons. That's not the case with the administration's assault on USAID, and Wiles knew that.
[Elon] Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.” ...
Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.
So she knew.
But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Some rational people would have wanted to fight harder or disassociate themselves from an administration that was about to leave
hundreds of thousands of people to die. Wiles chose to be a Uvalde cop.
She's not alone. The father of one of the programs Musk gutted effectively did nothing.
The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants....
Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush.
I want you to read this quote about George W. Bush closely. I hope it infuriates you as much as it infuriates me. I've highlighted that parts that are particularly enraging:
“He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”
Lives were in the balance, and Bush cared -- but it would have been
unseemly for him to express that concern
publicly. It's just not done! Trump is a fellow Republican, and one mustn't stir up trouble within the party,
even if thousands of lives are at stake, and even if your words
as a former president of the United States would carry great weight.
Reading this now is especially appalling because it comes at a time when a few Republicans are finally challenging Trump on some issues, at some personal risk.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and
Indiana state legislators are receiving death threats, but they're acting. Wiles did nothing. Bush did nothing.
Even
Peter Baker of
The New York Times can see Wiles's spinelessness.
President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
... Ms. Wiles confided in Mr. Whipple in March that she had told Mr. Trump that his presidency was not supposed to be a retribution tour.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
If this ends with Susie Wiles resigning and getting a cushy, high-paying cable-news commentator job while she works on a seven-figure memoir, that's another failure of our political culture. She had power. She didn't use it. She could have fought the administration's psychopaths. In real time, like the cops in Uvalde, she just allowed them to keep hurting people.
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