Susie Wiles Lashes Out at Stunning, on-the-Record Vanity Fair Profile: ‘Disingenuously Framed Hit Piece’

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is forcefully pushing back against a stunning, on-the-record Vanity Fair profile in which she is quoted making a series of sharply critical remarks about President Donald Trump as well as several top aides and Cabinet officials.

The article, written by veteran Trump chronicler Chris Whipple, offers an extraordinary look at the first year of Trump’s second presidency, drawing on extensive and remarkably candid conversations with one of its chief architects. The resulting two-part profile sent shockwaves through the political media world.

Among the most explosive revelations: a striking comparison between Trump and an “alcoholic”, a tacit acknowledgment that the Justice Department has been weaponized as part of a retribution campaign, a blunt characterization of Vice President JD Vance as a conspiracy theorist, and a pointed admission that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on the Epstein files.

Wiles now claims the article distorted her remarks by stripping away key context to deliberately portray the administration as dysfunctional. In a statement posted publicly, Wiles wrote:

The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.

Significant 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.

The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade.

None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!

The episode underscores a familiar dynamic of the Trump era, now sharpened by the unprecedented spectacle of a second term. Insiders continue to speak with startling candor to journalists, only to recoil when the resulting portrait lands with a thud. What makes the Vanity Fair profile uniquely destabilizing is not merely its critical tone, but the fact that it relies so heavily on a figure as central and disciplined as Wiles, whose reputation has been built on control, message management, and loyalty.

For a White House that prides itself on unity and relentless forward motion, the damage is less about any single quote and more about the cumulative effect. The article reinforces an image of internal frustration and unresolved power struggles at a moment when the administration insists it is firing on all cylinders. Whether Wiles’s rebuttal blunts that perception remains to be seen, but the story has already achieved what such profiles often do best: peeling back the curtain just enough to make the denials feel like part of the narrative rather than its conclusion