Since September 2, the Trump administration has been bombing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans on the pretext of combating drug trafficking. This was always a flimsy justification, but we can now confidently say that it was a flat lie. That’s thanks to the testimony of one of Trump’s top aides, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, which has been published in a blockbuster Vanity Fair article by Chris Whipple.

On November 2, Whipple writes, Wiles said,  “[Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until [Venezuelan president Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” In other words, all the talk of narco-terrorism was a sham. On Tuesday, Trump announced he was instigating a naval blockade on Venezuela until “they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” This escalation (as well as the rationale of unvarnished plunder) lends credibility to Wiles’ claim that regime change in Venezuela was the driver of policy all along. 

Over the past year, Whipple has had eleven extensive interviews with Wiles, which form the basis of his Vanity Fair piece. The article is remarkable for two reasons: who Wiles is and the astonishing things she has said on the record. As Chief of Staff, Wiles holds the most important position in the White House next to the president himself. By reputation, she’s a professional and effective manager skilled at facilitating Trump’s agenda—and,unlike many of the self-aggrandizing personalities who have gathered around Trump, Wiles has been seen as someone who kept a low profile.

Yet Whipple shows us a very different Wiles—one whocan constantly be heard disdaining Trump and those around him while also distancing herself (albeit subtly) from the White House’s most controversial actions. 

According to Wiles, Trump has an “an alcoholic’s personality” which she was able to spot since her father, the late football player Pat Summerall, had been an alcoholic. This characterization is likely to be especially hurtful to Trump, a famous teetotaler whose brother died of alcoholism. Wiles says that Vice President JD Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that his conversion from being Never Trump to MAGA zealot was “sort of political.” She calls former DOGE head Elon Musk “an avowed Ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.” When queried about a political extreme tweet Musk posted, Wiles responds, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” And she calls Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, as  “a right-wing absolute zealot.”

Wiles lends her seal of authority to many of the harshest criticisms of Trump’s presidency by painting it as lawless and chaotic. She acknowledges that Trump’s prosecution of political foes such as former FBI head James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James is motivated in part by score settling and retribution. 

Wiles admits Trump flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and describes their friendship as being “sort of young, single playboys together.” She is scathing about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein Files, saying, “I 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’t on her desk.” 

She claims to have been “initially aghast” at Musk’s plans to slash USAID, “because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.” She also distances herself from Trump’s pardon of violent January 6 rioters as well as the actions of “overzealous” Border Patrol agents.

Taken as a whole, Wiles’ litany of complaints and disavowals amounts to a damning picture of Trump’s presidency. Her comments about Musk using Ketamine are so damaging that Wiles tried to deny them, telling The New York Times, “That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” The newspaper went on to note that, “Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.” As Whipple notes, despite White House complaints that he quoted out of context, none of his facts have been challenged.