Read Chris Whipple’s new Vanity Fair profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and by the end you’ll have found cause to (simultaneously) impeach Donald Trump, remove him under the terms of the 25th amendment, and run Wiles, JD Vance, plus several cabinet members out of federal office and into federal prison.
Don’t have the time or a subscription to Vanity Fair? Fear not, I’ve done the work for you.
Below you’ll find the most damning revelations, interspersed with my own comments. They are ordered as they appear in the story. The article bounces back and forth in time, so these aren’t strictly chronological, but they do trace the arc of the second Trump presidency pretty neatly.
As you read, bear in mind that the Democratic Party leadership holds the view that House Democrats should not support privileged resolutions of impeachment.
On Trump’s first day in office… Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)
Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’ ”
“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.)
As Politico’s Kyle Cheney notes, Whipple’s final corrective here significantly understates the truth, and thus provides Wiles with a false alibi. Basically nobody who tried to overthrow the government was sentenced to serve more time than the guidelines recommended. Her claim is thus factually impossible, and inconsistent with Trump’s decision to pardon all of the rioters.
A generous interpretation is that Trump was confused (or that he had been manipulated) and Wiles never double checked his claims. It’s more likely that Trump was unconcerned with the truth from the getgo, and Wiles is lying now to downplay the significance of that enormous jailbreak. In either case, the pardons were an impeachable offense, and Wiles’s cover story discredits her. Trump’s inattention to detail and comfort telling lies aren’t really the kinds of ailments the 25th amendment was ratified to address—but if I were in Trump’s cabinet, I’d be disturbed enough to start surveying my colleagues.
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Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Emphasis added.
A literal interpretation here places us more squarely in 25th amendment territory. What does it say if the president is simply incapable of understanding how the agencies he oversees function?
Ratchet down the literalism just a bit, and the claim is more like: Trump is smart enough to understand what agencies like USAID do, but temperamentally unwilling to learn, like a delinquent teenager. And the 25th amendment wasn’t really designed to root out stubbornness and impatience (though they are maladaptive traits for a president).
In any event, whether the president doesn’t know what’s happening in his own government because he’s too diminished or too cranky, it increases the risk that self-interested courtiers will seize control of components of the government and turn them against the public interest. That transforms the chief of staff into a failsafe. In a real Weekend At Bernie’s situation, where the inner circle of government had decided to prop up a mummified president, you’d ideally want an ethical chief of staff, or else perhaps the vice-president, to serve as the ultimate decision maker. You definitely would not want an industrialist (who happened to be the president’s top donor) to slide into that role. But Wiles allowed it! Grounds for termination.
“There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
The surface-level embarrassment here is the admission that they mollify Trump as if he were a toddler shrieking in the aisles of a grocery store. But the larger scandal here is that everyone in the administration knows full well Trump’s tariff regime is not a response to any emergency. A 90 day panic pause is not consistent with the concept of a national emergency. And, more generally, this is not how principals deliberate over responding to an emergency. It’s just a policy dispute—a normal-ish policy dispute—except for one thing: whatever the Supreme Court holds as to “emergency tariff authority,” there’s definitely no sweeping unilateral tariff authority for ordinary times. “Making bad faith arguments in court in order to justify an abuse of power” is certainly frowned upon, though arguably not impeachable. The fact that Wiles and Vance seem to know they serve a mad king, though, does bring us to the threshold of removal.
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Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” (Trump started dating Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005, sometime in 1998. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser, who died by suicide earlier this year, first met Epstein while she was a Mar-a-Lago spa worker in 2000. Trump and Epstein reportedly had a falling out in 2004.)
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
Set aside everything about Trump’s relationship with Epstein that Wiles gets wrong here—that Trump was single (he was not) and young (he was in his 50s).
Here she admits that Trump either intentionally slandered Bill Clinton or hallucinated something defamatory about him and asserted it as fact. A president who engages in casual slander should probably be impeached and removed, though one could argue it both ways. A president who hallucinates uncontrollably should be deposed by his vice president and cabinet. At the end of the day, the only consequence Trump’s likely to face here is the implosion of his diversionary scheme to counter-investigate Clinton. But (charitably) Wiles demonstrates no attention to detail, and thus should not be White House chief of staff.
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Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)
What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.”
There’s no sense in playing dumb. Wiles is just lying here. Either that or she’s exposing herself as the biggest mark on the planet. I’d argue lying, because she surely knows that if Trump learned of and became upset about any act of insubordination, he’d make a big show of firing or otherwise humiliating the person responsible. He’s Mister Unitary Executive, until some bureaucrat or appointee swaddles a child abuser in a manner that incriminates him, at which point he becomes powerless? An unfortunate defect!
So she’s probably lying. And if Wiles knows she’s lying, then she’s also admitting that the administration spearheads frivolous defamation lawsuits as an intimidation and reprisal tactic. Everyone must lose their job!
During my first visit with Wiles at the White House in November, Trump’s revenge tour against his domestic enemies was in full swing. So was his lethal campaign against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who, Trump was convinced, headed a powerful drug cartel. Over lunch, Wiles told me about Trump’s Venezuela strategy: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” (Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.)
Whipple spells this one out for us. Wiles here confesses that Trump’s campaign of bombing fisher boats in the Caribbean is purely pretextual, and the real goal is regime change in Venezuela. A bunch of people should be impeached or fired, and imprisoned, obviously.
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Vance, Rubio, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an informal adviser, have been running Trump’s foreign policy since the departure of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who was moved to UN ambassador after Signalgate. “I’m not horrified by it,” Wiles said of the infamous unsecured chat about US attack plans against the Houthis to which The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly admitted. She noted, with an edge, “The burden’s on us to make sure that [national security] conversations are preserved. In this case, Jeff Goldberg did it for us.”
The comment qua comment is actually pretty funny. Against a different backdrop of fitting consequences for Pete Hegseth et al, there’d be no problem at all. But in context, it’s clear that Wiles has at best made peace with serving in an administration where consequences for corruption or incompetence are frowned upon. Frustrating as that might be for her, it also may be why she gets to keep her job after this profile. The irony is rich.
It’s also possible, though, that Wiles is perfectly OK with gross negligence and all other manner of oopsies. In that case, if she does lose her job over this profile, it’ll be the right call for the wrong reason.
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“Will the president run for a third term?” I asked in November.
“No,” she said and then added, “But he sure is having fun with it.” Wiles said he knows it’s “driving people crazy.”
“So that’s why he talks about it,” I said.
“Yeah, 100 percent.”
“Would you say categorically no, and that the 22nd Amendment rules out [a third term]?”
“I do. Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer, but based on my reading of it, it’s pretty unequivocal.”
“And has he told you that in so many words?”
“Yes. Oh, a couple times, yeah.”
And then she went on. “Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’ And then he immediately says, ‘Not really. I will have served two terms and I will have gotten done what I need to get done, and it’s time to give somebody else a chance.’ So, you know, any given day, right? But he knows he can’t run again.”
File this one away briefly. The claim here is that Trump’s private assertions to her are credible, and he can thus be trusted not to seek an unconstitutional third term, in violation of his oath of office.
Alas, reader, I regret to inform you:
Back in March, on the 56th day of Trump’s presidency, I’d asked Wiles: “Do you ever go in to Trump and say, ‘Look, this is not supposed to be a retribution tour? ’”
“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”
“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said. “A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
“So all of this talk,” I said, “about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud….”
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles replied.
“So you haven’t called him [out] on that, or said, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”
“No, no, not on her,” Wiles said. “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money!” Wiles laughed….
In November, it was Comey’s turn in the dock. “So tell me why the Comey prosecution doesn’t just look like the fix is in,” I asked her.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
There are three impeachable admissions here: The big one is mens rea: that Wiles and Trump consciously agreed with one another that (for three months, at least) he would abuse the powers of the presidency to violate the rights of innocent Americans. The most actionable is her acknowledgment that the administration’s effort to indict Letitia James has been an act of political retaliation. Third is that Trump remains determined to harass his political enemies, even long after the 90 days have expired.
Horrific, criminal. But for Wiles, it’s also self-discrediting. She agreed to work for Trump and he agreed to cut the dictator shit out after 90 days. He violated that agreement. She shrugged it off. What use, then, are her assurances that Trump won’t seek a third term? Or that he hasn’t actually been falling asleep during meetings, or that he doesn’t know why Ghislaine Maxwell got VIP treatment? His track record of honesty is as poor with her as it is with us.
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