Susie Wiles Says Trump Has an ‘Alcoholic’s Personality’ in Bombshell Vanity Fair Interviews

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said President Donald Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” and suggested New York Attorney General Letitia James was targeted in retribution for prosecuting the president, according to a series of bombshell on-the-record interviews published by Vanity Fair.

Wiles said in a post on X Tuesday that her quotes had been taken out of context and that the article was intended to portray the administration negatively. She stopped short of saying she was misquoted.

“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,” Wiles wrote on X. “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 White House is publicly standing behind her.

“President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X, sharing Wiles’ post. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who Wiles referred to as a “a right-wing absolute zealot” to Vanity Fair, wrote on X that “she is always an ally in helping me deliver for the president. And this hit piece will not slow us down.”

White House officials have also been circulating Wiles’ post to allies as they seek to contain potential fallout, according to a source close to the administration.

The interviews, conducted by journalist Chris Whipple over the course of the last year with Wiles and other top officials, featured unusually frank on-the-record comments from Wiles.

Wiles has been credited with keeping the second Trump White House more aligned than the first administration. They’ve had fewer leaks and palace-intrigue style stories. And Wiles has only sat for a handful of softer interviews.

The articles in Vanity Fair feature plenty of Wiles lauding the president and the rest of his team. But they also suggest some potential internal discord between prominent White House officials. She described Vice President JD Vance’s shift from Trump critic to MAGA ally as “sort of political” and said that Vance “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”

On James, Wiles gave ammunition to the claim that Trump targeted the New York attorney general because her office was responsible for a civil suit against Trump that resulted in a fine of over $400 million, according to the published interviews.

“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles told Vanity Fair when asked about the Trump administration accusing James of mortgage fraud.

She downplayed retaliatory motives when asked by The New York Times about those comments.

“It’s not that he thinks they wronged him, although they did,” she told The New York Times. “He thinks that they wronged, and they should not be able to do to somebody else what they did to him and the way that you could cure that, at least potentially, is to expose what was done.”

Wiles was also critical of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files.

“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said. “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.”

Wiles said that she had read the Epstein files, and that Trump was mentioned but was “not doing anything awful.”

Her comments on the Trump administration’s strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs diverged somewhat from the White House’s messaging. While officials have insisted the strikes are not tied to efforts for regime change in Venezuela, she said they were meant to send a message to Nicolás Maduro.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Vanity Fair. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

This article has been updated to include comments by Susie Wiles to The New York Times and comments by Russell Vought.