Why Susie Spilled

Politicians, they’re just like us.

Susie Wiles in the Oval Office. (Photo by the White House)

Since I wasn’t yet reporting during the run-up to the Iraq War — in my defense, I was a toddler¹ — one of the greatest failures of political journalism over the course of my career has been the reporting, or lack thereof, about President Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office.

Millions of Americans — including many Democratic officials — expressed surprise after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, which ultimately means that what they had been reading and seeing in the media had not kept them fully informed on what was happening in reality. When that’s the case, that generally means reporters have missed something.

In fairness, of course, some stories are harder to crack than others. In this case, it is certainly true that journalists could have done more to report what was happening in front of all of our faces, as Biden increasingly showed the effects of his age. But most journalists prefer to report on what is happening behind the scenes: anecdotes about a president performing shakily behind closed doors, or aides whispering amongst themselves.

Here, journalists are, to some degree, at the mercy of their sources. True, there are some stories where you can dig up some sheaf of documents to tell readers something they don’t know, but presidential medical records aren’t exactly FOIAble. If a president is only routinely seen by a small clique of advisers, as was the case with Biden, and that small clique has no interest in speaking with the press, as was the case with Biden’s aides, journalists are limited in what they can tell the public since there is only a small group of people who know the truth and that group isn’t willing to spill.

Why weren’t they? It’s a fascinating psychological question, really, why some people leak and others don’t. It is rarely in an administration’s best interest that officials gossip with reporters, and yet, officials do it all the time. In the Biden case, where the professional identities of all the relevant figures were wrapped up in Joe Biden, the incentives simply weren’t there: their own relevance relied on Biden being re-elected (and, thus, being viewed as healthy) in a way that isn’t usually the case for political hired guns. Without Biden, most of them weren’t going to have a continued career in Democratic politics. Also, if some people in an administration are leaking, it usually induces other people to leak (If journalists are going to be writing about this anyway, aides think, I better get my side of the story out there, too). Leaks beget more leaks. But if an administration can last a while without that environment of competitive leaking, it can sometimes manage to stay that way.

The first Trump White House was one of the leakiest in history: there were a lot of people with competing narratives who wanted to get their stories out. The second Trump White House has been somewhere between Biden and Trump I in terms of leakiness: not a sieve, but not a black box either. That has usually been credited to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, the so-called “Ice Maiden” (Trump’s words) who is thought to have brought order to his second administration.

Imagine the shock in Washington, then, when it was Wiles herself who was revealed yesterday to have spent the last year gabbing to a journalist — producing the biggest leak of the year that didn’t involve adding a reporter to an administration group chat.

Tidbits from journalist Chris Whipple’s conversations with Wiles were published by Vanity Fair in two installments (Parts 1 and 2 are here, both behind a paywall). Some of the greatest hits:

• She said that President Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.”

• She said that Vice President JD Vance is “a conspiracy theorist.”

• She said that Elon Musk is “an odd, odd duck” who uses ketamine.

• She said that Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the handling of the Epstein files.

• She called White House budget director Russell Vought a “right-wing absolute zealot.”

• She said she disagreed with Trump’s pardon of violent January 6th offenders.

• She said that “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” adding that she was “aghast” when she first learned the agency would be shuttered, because she believed it did “very good work.”

• She said that the tariff rollout has been “more painful than I expected” and that she urged the president to wait before imposing them.

• She thinks that the president needs to focus less on foreign policy: “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for. [Voters] like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”

• She contradicted Trump by saying that the Epstein files, which she has read, contain no evidence that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s private island. “The president was wrong about that,” she said.

• She said that neither she nor the president were aware that Ghislaine Maxwell was going to be transferred to a less restrictive prison facility, and that neither of them were happy about it.

• She indicated that she did not support some of the revenge prosecutions Trump has carried out. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles told Whipple in March, an “agreement” that has obviously not stuck.

A lot to unpack there!

The disclosures were so candid and explosive that many people quickly rushed to assume Wiles had an ulterior motive. Wiles is “too savvy to get caught off guard,” one liberal activist wrote; she must have been “playing” the Vanity Fair reporter to “get across narratives that she wanted to appear as unvarnished truth.” A conservative radio host wondered if Wiles was attempting to execute a coup. A podcaster speculated that she had seen the Epstein files and was trying to distance herself from Trump before their release.

Many people often think of political actors as calculating, larger-than-life figures, carrying out grand plans for either benevolent or malevolent ends. And sometimes, I’m sure, they are. But I think a lot of political analysis would be improved if, instead, we think of politicians as, well, humans, not that much unlike you or me.

Why did Susie Wiles talk to Chris Whipple? Well, what are the reasons you have told someone something you shouldn’t have?

There are probably a few. Sometimes, it makes you feel important to know something someone else doesn’t, and it feels cool to magnanimously let them in on the secret. Sometimes, you need to let off steam. Sometimes, someone is just that good at cracking you, and you let your guard down when you probably shouldn’t. Sometimes, you’re under the impression that the person you’re talking to isn’t going to repeat what you’re telling them, an impression turns out to be false. (“You never said I couldn’t tell anyone!” “Well, I just thought you would know better than to repeat it!”)

My overwhelming assumption is, rather than any Big Secret Reason, Wiles talked to Whipple for some combination of the reasons I laid out above, which are all familiar reasons why people say things they aren’t supposed to.²

Whipple, it should be noted, is kind of the GOAT of getting White House chiefs of staff to talk to him: for his 2017 history of the job, The Gatekeepers, every living chief of staff agreed to an interview. (It’s also just a really good book.) This speaks to two of our above reasons: he’s clearly someone good at getting people comfortable and coaxing them to let their guard down, and also carries himself less as a day-to-day political journalist than a historian of the White House. Wiles may have been acting at least partially out of vanity, my first reason above, thinking that she was speaking to history.

The last reason probably played a role, too: per Rachael Bade, Wiles and her team felt the ground rules for her interviews with Whipple weren’t clear. My guess is she either thought she was talking “on background” (which means the quotes wouldn’t have been directly attributed to her) or for a future book project — not that those aren’t embarrassing mistakes for a White House chief of staff to make.

I actually attended a book event of Whipple’s in April, where he said that Wiles had told him that she pushed back against Trump’s January 6th pardons and urged the president to handle cases individually, rather than giving a blanket pardon. At the time, I tweeted out the comment, but it struck me as strange that a White House chief of staff would have distanced herself from a key presidential decision in that way. I wondered whether Whipple was violating the terms of an off-the-record conversation; now, it seems it may have been a conversation Wiles thought was off the record, without securing Whipple’s agreement.

There is a long history of presidents and their advisers falling into these sorts of traps, speaking either because they got too comfortable or thought they weren’t on the record. See: Stanley McChrystal, 2010 or Anthony Scaramucci, 2017. Even Trump himself made this mistake with Bob Woodward in his first term, like many presidents before him. (In that way, Whipple is sort of the Woodward of chiefs of staff, one journalist noted.)

The other White House response to the Vanity Fair story has been that Wiles was taken out of context. It’s hard to see how that could be true: what’s the context where comparing the president to an alcoholic is a compliment?

But if you read the entirety of the two Vanity Fair pieces, Wiles’ comments do come off a little differently than they do in isolation. By themselves, the comments read as harsh indictments of many of her colleagues. But when read how Wiles tried to frame them, they often come off much more detached than that.

Taken together, they give great insight into how Wiles views her job — and why it’s probably secure. The comments come off less as jabs than as observations she’s making, without assigning much judgment one way or the other.

Wiles clearly doesn’t view it as her job to judge: her job is to execute. It’s surprising how many presidential decisions — USAID, tariffs, January 6th pardons — she’s admitting to have disagreed with, but the point of her saying these things is often to prove that she’s willing to carry them out anyway.

That, above all, is what matters to Trump. Trump is remarkably forgiving of politicians who disagree with and have criticized him, even in quite aggressive terms — most of his inner circle, including JD Vance and Marco Rubio, fall into this category — that is, as long as they are willing to fall in line and go his way. To Trump, that’s the ultimate show of loyalty, and he loves making others do it, proving the power he wields over them.

It’s no surprise that Susie Wiles doesn’t agree with everything Trump does: after all, this is someone who once managed Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign — a moderate, bipartisan, soft-spoken Mormon who occupied about as different a faction of the GOP from Trump as one can imagine.

But there’s nothing Trump likes more than watching someone who disagreed with him take their lumps and become a convert. Who cares if someone privately disagrees with him on tariffs or pardons? As long as they’re willing to do things his way, Trump often couldn’t care less. He can stand disagreement, just not someone standing in his way.

This separates Wiles from Trump’s first-term advisers, who occasionally went so far as to take papers off Trump’s desk to prevent him from doing things they didn’t support. But Wiles is fine administering things she doesn’t agree with. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles told Whipple. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

“I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you,” Wiles said that she tells Trump, paraphrasing legendary chief of staff James Baker. Music to Trump’s ears.

Trump clearly ignores her advice a lot, but she does want he wants anyway, an image he loves: Trump always wants to be seen as his own person, completely unmanageable, so it’s no surprise that he didn’t mind the Vanity Fair story.

In fact, in an interview with the New York Post on Tuesday, he even copped to one of Wiles’ more surprising observations. “I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker,” Trump said. “If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.”

1. “But haven’t you been doing this since you were five?” C’mon, I wasn’t that young.

2. It should also be noted that any analysis that assumes Wiles spoke to Whipple due to something that happened recently is automatically wrong. (Or any analysis that tries to place Wiles’ comments within a larger, recent trend of the wheels coming off for Trump.) They spoke for 11 interviews over the course of 11 months, dating back to the start of the administration.