Trump’s Chief of Staff Called JD Vance a Conspiracy Theorist—and Somehow It’s Not News

Noted sportswriter Richard Deitsch made a simple observation this week that should have stopped the political press cold. In a Vanity Fair profile, Susie Wiles, who serves as White House Chief of Staff under Trump, went on the record and said that Vice President JD Vance had been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.

Not anonymously. Not as background. On the record.

That used to be a five-alarm moment.

JD Vance is not a podcast host or a backbench provocateur. He is the sitting vice president of the United States. One heartbeat from the presidency. Daily intelligence briefing. Continuity-of-government planning. The role requires a baseline trust in reality itself. Labeling someone in that position a conspiracy theorist is not an insult. It is an indictment of fitness for office.

Vance’s response was telling. He didn’t deny the characterization. Instead, he said he only believes in “conspiracy theories that are true.” That formulation—treating conspiracy thinking as a matter of discernment rather than methodology—is remarkable on its own. It’s also a perfect distillation of how normalized this has become. And yet the story barely lasted a day.

The reason isn’t simply scandal fatigue or strategic silence, though both play a role. The deeper reason is more unsettling. The allegation didn’t vanish because it was unbelievable. It vanished because it was plausible.

Nothing about Wiles’s description shocked audiences. It aligned too comfortably with what people already believe about JD Vance, about Trump’s orbit, and about modern American politics more broadly. That plausibility drained the story of urgency before it ever had a chance to harden into a crisis.

We’ve seen this dynamic repeatedly. When then-candidate Donald Trump amplified claims that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs, the statement should have triggered institutional alarm. Instead, it was treated as another entry in the long list of bizarre assertions that now accompany serious political power. Absurd, yes. But familiar. And familiarity is disqualifying for outrage.

The same pattern played out when members of Congress flirted with QAnon rhetoric, suggested Sandy Hook was a false flag, or trafficked in fantasies about Jewish space lasers. These were not fringe internet figures. They were elected officials with committee assignments and national influence. The response was rarely sustained scrutiny. It was momentary coverage followed by normalization.

When conspiracy thinking becomes ambient rather than aberrational, exposure loses its power.

That creates a dead zone in political coverage. If an allegation is outrageous but implausible, it generates outrage. If it triggers formal consequences, it generates process journalism. But when it is both enormous and unsurprising, it falls through the cracks. The press doesn’t quite know how to cover it, and political actors know they don’t have to respond.

Silence, in this environment, isn’t confusion. It’s strategy.

The Trump administration understands that engagement extends stories. Media organizations understand that attention is finite and outrage is abundant. When both sides decline to act, the clock runs out. The absence of response becomes a quiet veto on accountability.

What makes this moment particularly bleak is how easily it was accepted. Americans no longer expect internal coherence from their leaders. They assume dysfunction as the default setting. A chief of staff publicly questioning whether the vice president shares a common reality with the rest of the government doesn’t feel like a rupture in norms. It feels like confirmation.

That’s the real shift. In earlier eras, scandal relied on disbelief. Now disbelief has collapsed. Plausibility has replaced accountability.

Deitsch’s point wasn’t merely that the story disappeared quickly. It’s that a charge this serious could disappear at all. If the allegation is true, the public deserves to know how someone with a decade-long history of conspiratorial thinking ended up a heartbeat from the presidency. If it’s false, the public deserves to know why a sitting chief of staff felt comfortable saying something so destabilizing on the record.

Instead, we got a shrug.

The danger isn’t that we’re outraged less often. It’s that we’ve built a political and media culture where even allegations that go to the core of governing competence can be safely ignored, so long as they sound like something we’ve already learned to expect.

That is what was lost in those 24 hours. Not a scandal, but the basic function of a press and political system meant to tell the public when something actually matters.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.