President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, known for operating behind the scenes, is suddenly in the media spotlight after sparking controversy in a candid interview with Vanity Fair magazine.

In the interview, Susie Wiles described Trump as having an “alcoholic personality,” tech mogul Elon Musk as a “strange duck,” and Vice President J.D. Vance as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Wiles slammed the two-part Vanity Fair article published on Tuesday, calling it a “hit piece.”

Trump stood by his top aide, whom he called the “Ice Girl,” and White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt said: “The entire administration … is united and fully behind her.”

Here’s a closer look at who Wiles is and what the report contains:

What was the basis for the Vanity Fair article?

Vanity Fair published a two-part report on the second Trump administration, which began in January. The report is based on interviews with Wiles over the past year by American documentary filmmaker and journalist Chris Whipple.

Whipple, who conducted 11 public interviews with Wiles, wrote that Wiles chronicled the first year of Trump’s second term “at every moment of crisis.”

The first interview took place on January 11, a week before Trump’s inauguration.

Who is Suzy Wiles?

Wiles, 68, is the White House chief of staff. She is the first woman in history to hold this position.

In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower in New York to meet with Trump, who was transitioning from a real estate developer to a presidential candidate.

In the Vanity Fair article, Whipple described her as “the most powerful person in the Trump White House besides the president himself.”

Whipple quoted an unnamed former Republican leader as saying: “A lot of big decisions are made based on the whim of the president. The only force that I know of that can guide or direct that whim is Suzy.”

Wiles rose from a Capitol Hill intern in the 1970s to a top Republican strategist. At 23, she got a job as a dispatcher in the White House when Republican Ronald Reagan was president.

Wiles’s childhood was difficult. Her father, Pat Summerall, was a famous American football broadcaster and alcoholic. According to Vanity Fair, she grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey.

What did Wiles say about Trump and his aides?

Here’s what Wiles told Vanity Fair about Trump and his aides, and how some of them reacted:

trump card

According to Vanity Fair, Wiles said she never doubted Trump would win the presidential election in November 2024.

She added that she would present a “new Trump” to the public, even telling House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries before Trump was inaugurated that he would see a different side of Trump in his second term. She said Trump would be calmer and less likely to lose his temper.

“I didn’t see him throwing anything, I didn’t see him scream. I didn’t see the really horrific behavior that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago,” Whipple quoted Wiles as saying in his article.

Although Trump is a teetotaler, Wiles was quoted as saying that Trump “has an alcoholic personality” and that he “thinks there is nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

In an interview with the New York Post published Tuesday, Trump defended Wiles.

Regarding the alcoholic comment, Trump said: “She meant I – look, I don’t drink. So everybody knows that, but I often say that if I did, there’s a good chance I’d be an alcoholic. I’ve said that about myself many times. And I do. It’s a very possessive character.”

Referring to the Whipple report, Trump said, “I didn’t read it, but I didn’t read Vanity Fair, but (Wiles) did a great job.”

The New York Post quoted Trump as saying: “I think from what I heard, the facts were wrong and this was a very misleading interviewer who was intentionally misleading.”

Levitt also backed Wiles in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

“I would agree with my boss, Susie Wells, who was the best chief of staff in the history of our country, working for the greatest president in the history of our country,” Levitt said. “Unfortunately, this is yet another attempt by a journalist to create fake news, acting dishonestly and indeed taking information out of context.

“Reporters ignored all the positive things Suzy and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.”

JD Vance

Wiles said the vice president’s shift from opposing Trump to fully supporting him was largely for political reasons. She also said Vance had been obsessed with conspiracy theories for about a decade.

Vance, who also said he had not read the Vanity Fair article, supported Wiles during a speech Tuesday in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.

“You know why I really love Susie Wiles? Because Susie is who she is when the president is around, and she’s the same person when the president isn’t around,” Vance said.

“I have never seen her disloyal to the President of the United States, which makes her the best White House chief of staff a president could ask for,” he said.

Elon Musk

Wiles also expressed his views on billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the CEO of private space exploration company SpaceX and electric car company Tesla.

Musk was a close aide to Trump in the early months of his second term, overseeing the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) that Trump created to slash the U.S. government bureaucracy. DOGE is known for massive layoffs of federal government workers and the abrupt closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Wiles described Musk as a “one-man show” and told Whipple “the challenge for Elon is to keep up with him.”

“He was an open ketamine (user). During the day he slept in a sleeping bag in the EOB (Executive Office Building). He was an odd duck, like what I thought was a genius. You know, it didn’t help, but he was who he was,” the Vanity Fair article quoted Wiles as saying.

Musk has yet to respond publicly to the article. In March, he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, a social media platform he purchased in 2022, saying, “I’m a huge fan of Susie Wiles,” in response to a video of him helping Wiles carry a bag.

When Trump named Wiles chief of staff after winning the election in November 2024, Musk posted a screenshot of a press release about the announcement and wrote, “Susie Wiles is great.”

Pam Bundy

In the interview, Wiles also criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein file. The wealthy convicted pedophile committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell in 2019. Epstein is awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

However, conspiracy theorists claim he may have been murdered because he kept a secret client list of powerful people, including politicians, who allegedly abused underage girls. In July, the U.S. Department of Justice, led by Bondi, draw conclusions Epstein had no client list.

The Justice Department memo angered right-wing conspiracy theorists and some supporters of the U.S. president because it was seen as a retreat from a narrative once promoted by members of the Trump administration.

When Bundy was asked about Epstein’s client list during an interview on Fox News in February, she responded: “It’s sitting on my desk right now, available for review.”

That same month, political commentators and far-right influencers were invited to the White House and presented documents titled “The Epstein Dossier: Phase One.” Bundy released the documents, which do not contain any revelations about Epstein’s case.

Whipple wrote that Wiles said Bundy was “completely upset” because she learned that the conservative influencers she invited to the White House were the audience most interested in the documents.

Wiles was quoted as saying that Bundy gave those with influence “binders full of nothingness.” “There was no client list, and there was no list on her desk,” Wiles stressed.

What does Wiles think about other issues?

Trump pardons January 6

On January 6, 2021, thousands of rioters, fueled by false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

More than 2,000 people broke into the seat of the U.S. Congress, destroyed offices and clashed with police, resulting in at least five deaths and many injuries.

About 1,270 people have been convicted of federal crimes in connection with the riots, with sentences for leaders of far-right groups ranging from a few years to more than two decades.

On the day he took office for his second term, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 people convicted or indicted in the riots, calling their treatment “outrageous.”

Wiles told Whipple she questioned Trump pardoning all 1,500 people.

Vanity Fair quoted her as saying: “I said, ‘I support people who happen to do anything violent by accident or who didn’t do anything violent. Of course we know what everyone did because the FBI does such an incredible job.'”

She added that Trump claimed that even violent criminals were being treated unfairly.

USAID closes

Wiles said she was “shocked” when she learned USAID was being shut down.

“I think anyone who follows the administration and has followed USAID believes, as I do, that they are doing a good job,” Whipple quoted her as saying.

Attack on suspected drug trafficking ship

Since September, the US military has carried out military strikes on more than 20 ships in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, causing deaths. More than 80 people. The Trump administration claimed without evidence that the ships belonged to drug cartels and were carrying drugs. It also accuses Venezuela’s left-wing government of being involved in drug trafficking.

“Every time we destroy a ship, we save 25,000 people,” Trump claimed in an interview with Politico published last week.

Whipple quoted Wiles as saying: “As he has said many times, the president believes in tough penalties for drug traffickers…These are not the fishing boats that some have claimed.

“The president said 25,000. I don’t know what that number is. But he thinks these are lives saved, not people killed.”

Wiles also confirmed Trump Wants to continue bombing suspected drug-trafficking ships That was until the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, “called uncle.”

How did Wiles react to the Vanity Fair article?

Wiles criticized the Vanity Fair article as a “dishonestly framed hit piece.”

“The article published early this morning was a dishonestly offensive article about me and the best president, White House staff and Cabinet in history,” she wrote on X on Tuesday.

“Important context was ignored, and much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story. After reading it, I believe this was done to paint an extremely confusing and negative narrative about the president and our team,” she added.

She went on to claim that Trump accomplished more in his 11-month second term than any president in eight years.