President Donald Trump, administration officials and Republican allies were quick to come to the defense of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday after the release of two Vanity Fair articles featuring her candid comments on the president, other top officials and their policies.
Trump told the New York Post that Wiles had his full support and that she had done a “fantastic job.” He said Wiles’ assessment in the Vanity Fair that he “has an alcoholic’s personality” was a fair one.
“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump told the Post.
Wiles said on X she believed her quotes had been taken out of context, but did not deny making the comments to author Chris Whipple, who interviewed her multiple times over the course of the past year.
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White House officials shared Wiles’ X post with allies to contain backlash, a source close to the administration told NOTUS.
The coordinated defense was evident on social media, where more than a dozen high-level officials shared Wiles’ comment with praise for the chief of staff. The Office of Management and Budget’s director, Russell Vought, who Wiles called a “right-wing absolute zealot,” posted a defense. So did Attorney General Pam Bondi, who Wiles criticized over her handling of the Epstein files.
Donald Trump Jr. chimed in as well.
“Susie Wiles is by far the most effective and trustworthy Chief of Staff that my father has ever had,” he said on X. “She was a loyal fighter for him from the moment she came on board.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt followed up her own post on Wiles with comments to reporters.
“This is, unfortunately, another example of disingenuous reporting where you have a reporter who took the chief of staff’s words wildly out of context, did not include the context those conversations were had,” Levitt told reporters Tuesday.
Vice President JD Vance similarly defended Wiles, who had called him a “conspiracy theorist for more than a decade.”
‘Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true,” Vance said.
“Susie Wiles, we have our disagreements — we agree on much more than we disagree — but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States,” he added later.
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