Why Trump’s Chief of Staff Isn’t Going Anywhere After Vanity Fair Article

edward douglas white jr. Domiciliate chief of faculty Susie Wiles is often designated by chairman Trump to fix problems. She spent part of Tuesday managing the fallout of a rare headache she created.

Wiles had given Vanity Fair a series of unusually candid interviews that offered criticism of the vice president, the attorney general and other senior administration officials while questioning some of the president’s first-year decisions.

Her office had directly set up a photo shoot for the magazine, asking others to participate before it occurred, according to White House officials. The photo shoot took an entire day. The White House communications office had little to do with the interviews, and officials were particularly aghast at close-up, unflattering photographs of some of the administration’s top officials.

None of that bothered Trump. He laughed at suggestions that he would fire Wiles, who has been his top adviser for years, aides said. The president told her that she shouldn’t have spent so much time talking to Vanity Fair because the publication is “never good to us,” according to a senior administration official.

“Yes, she’s doing a great job,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday when asked if she would remain in the job. Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Wiles “is the best chief of staff that President Trump could ever ask for.”

A representative for Vanity Fair didn’t provide comment.

Much of the federal government followed suit and rallied around Wiles, with even officials she had criticized sending out statements to praise her. The president told the New York Post that she is “fantastic” and he agreed with her assessment of his “alcoholic’s personality.” The vice president said it was true that he was often a “conspiracy theorist.” Pam Bondi, the attorney general who Wiles said had “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, called her a “dear friend.”

Donald Trump Jr. Said she swooped in to help when some Republicans in Washington treated him like a pariah and she was his father’s “most effective and trustworthy” chief of staff. On Tuesday, top outside allies to the chief of staff huddled with her inside her West Wing suite to weather the storm.

The 24-hour episode captivated Washington and was reminiscent of Trump’s first term, where personnel dramas and infighting often dominated attention. But unlike the first term, there were no calls from inside the West Wing for Wiles to lose her job or anonymous leaks meant to further embarrass her. Instead, the administration’s response to the news cycle demonstrated Wiles’ authority and just how firmly entrenched she is in Trump’s orbit.

It is hard to overstate Wiles’s importance in Trump’s circle.

The first female chief of staff, Wiles has been at the center of almost every major national security decision in his second term, and she coordinates his domestic and political agenda. She gained his trust by working for him in 2016 and helping to win Florida.

Wiles was a longtime Florida operator and managed the campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2018. He fired her after taking office and told others she was persona non grata in his orbit. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Wiles went to work for Trump when many Republicans wouldn’t. She went on to manage his winning 2024 campaign.

But unlike previous chiefs of staff, she doesn’t try to manage Trump but views herself as a manager of his staff who is tasked with implementing the policies he was elected to enact.

She has an office patio, where she has assembled lawmakers, lobbyists and others in Washington for drinks and cigars. Adorned on one wall is the Florida electors count from the presidential election. She also has a small storage closet of Trump merchandise to give visitors.

In many ways, she is the opposite of Trump. She rarely swears, attends church weekly and engenders deep loyalty. Colleagues joke that her sharpest criticism is often in the form of a question: “Did you think that was helpful?” A mother of two adult daughters, she has largely stayed away from Washington’s social scene.

In private, she can be calculating and tough and willing to wield the political knife. She keeps around her a set of sharp political operatives—often men, some who are technically “volunteers” who work outside the White House—that she calls informally “the boys.” In the Vanity Fair piece, Wiles’ deputy chief of staff James Blair said, “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.”

Trump and his team have been more focused in this term on “not giving the media a scalp” or revealing private disagreements, officials said. In the interviews, Wiles said she had disagreed with some of Trump’s decisions but had kept her disagreements private, until then.

White House officials said there was no Machiavellian master plan by Wiles to participate in the interviews with Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. After coming to like Whipple, she agreed to talk to him regularly about what was going on in the White House, often on the weekend. She told others that it was for a historical project. The conversations weren’t minded by a White House press staffer.

The piece started during the transition when Whipple interviewed Wiles as she was driving from her home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, to Mar-a-Lago. Wiles was familiar with Whipple’s work and had read his book on White House chiefs of staff, “The Gatekeepers.”

According to Whipple, she was aware that he was working on a forthcoming book, “The Kingmakers,” on presidential campaign managers from 1968 to present. Whipple said it became clear during their conversations that Wiles wanted to tell the story of the Trump White House. He said Vanity Fair was interested in doing a big piece, and Wiles agreed.

“It was a series of interviews by phone, and then I met her in person on Nov. 4, and there was a subsequent visit to the White House for the Vanity Fair photography session,” Whipple said. “We talked about the role of the White House Chief of Staff.” According to Whipple, among those Wiles looked for inspiration from was James Baker, who served as chief of staff to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Over the course of their interviews, Wiles opened up to Whipple about internal disagreements over Trump’s tariff policy and criticized the attorney general’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein and gutting of USAID by Elon Musk. She sometimes went off the record.

Wiles told others that she respected Whipple, and was upset by the final stories that were published on Tuesday. She has told others that she expected it to be a more positive profile and issued a rare statement saying her words were taken out of context. It was one of her first posts on Twitter since taking office.

“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,” she said.

A longtime political operative, Wiles is no stranger to navigating the press. But she rarely gives on the record interviews and prefers to operate behind the scenes. Inside the White House, aides are careful to monitor all mentions of her in the press, and to protect her at all costs, officials said.

Trump has sometimes encouraged her to do more public appearances.

“We’ve been together a long time and I’m so lucky every day that he trusts me to make decisions and to make recommendations. He doesn’t always listen or do what I say. I don’t want him to. But I’m always heard and that’s all you can ask for,” she said recently in a podcast interview.

On election night, Trump called Wiles to the microphone, credited her for his victory and asked her to speak. She demurred repeatedly and handed the microphone to co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, who referred to her as the “boss.”

“Susie likes to stay sort of in the back,” Trump said. “The ice maiden, we call her the ice maiden. Susie likes to stay in the background. She’s not in the background.”

Write to Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com

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