Clown Shoes

Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles has been granting access to Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple. The magazine published some gob-smacking excerpts of those interviews today.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but my initial reaction was to wonder if Wiles secretly hates her job and wants to be blown out the airlock.

Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”

Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.”

When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)… “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]… And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person…”

Upon reflection, I don’t think it’s that Wiles wants to be fired. Maybe she believes she’s indispensable to the operation of the careening clown car that is Trump II.

Perhaps she’s right about that; I don’t know. But in quoting people who’ve seen Wiles in action, Whipple reveals something about Wiles’ sense of her role as rabid dog handler.

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…”

In the West Wing, Wiles is surrounded by young MAGA men. “She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, said James Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.” Indeed, Wiles has seemed content to let her pit bulls—deputy chiefs of staff Miller, Blair, and Dan Scavino—run loose as she watches.

Whether she knows it or not, Wiles is in favor of destroying the country’s global influence and scientific leadership. She justifies it by echoing bog-standard MAGA mouth-noises one hears in the hinterlands from regular old Trump voters.

They hate the imperfect U.S. institutions that project hard and soft power — and not wholly without justification. But what makes their occasionally understandable discontent cross the line into monstrousness is that they are prepared to toss innumerable babies with the bathwater:

For Trump, Wiles has helped pick a Cabinet of MAGA hard-liners: Pete Hegseth, secretary of war (formerly defense); Kash Patel, FBI director; John Ratcliffe, CIA director; Pam Bondi, attorney general; Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence; and Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. Wiles calls them “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.” Trump’s Cabinet members are either one of the least qualified presidential teams in history or, to hear Wiles tell it, disrupters—the only people with the balls to take on an entrenched deep state.

“People talk about the deep state being at the State Department,” Wiles said. “It’s not. It’s the military-industrial complex.” Hegseth, in her view, is just the guy to take on the powers that be. She referred to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another world-class disrupter, as “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby.” In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted.

Left unspoken is the corollary: Consequences be damned. And that’s what makes their actions monstrous and indefensible and irresponsible.

No doubt their rectitude stems in part from a mindset Trump and Wiles share that is entirely the product of the latter half of the 20th century. Both grew up affluent with terrible fathers during that time. Both apparently forged an enduring outlook of The Way Things Should Be™.

The tragedy is their toxic nostalgia is shared by tens of millions who empowered them to make it so. But like the mindless MAGAs who never venture beyond canned slogans and transgressive thrills, Wiles fails to appreciate the context that made the prosperous-for-some era she (mis)remembers possible.

As she facilitates the Trump regime’s breaking shit is fun and good, actually ethos, Wiles is destroying the country that she probably sincerely believes she loves. And what she is destroying cannot be rebuilt. Unlike Trump, Wiles isn’t stupid, but she’ll probably never understand that.

This makes me almost as cranky as the near-certainty that neither she nor the monsters she serves will ever face consequences for their actions. I wish them all a moment of clarity at the end, even if it’s fleeting.

Open thread.

ETA: LOL!

The Wiles of Susie WilesPost + Comments (204)