Trump officials respond to Susie Wiles’ ‘Vanity Fair’ interview
From J.D. Vance to Caroline Leavitt, Trump administration officials spoke to Susie Wiles for Vanity Fair.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he supports Susie Wiles following the chief of staff’s extensive comments published in Vanity Fair, saying he agrees with her assessment that he has an “alcoholic personality.”
President Trump addressed Wiles’ comments to Vanity Fair in a separate interview with the New York Post on Tuesday, December 16, as the White House spent the day actively working to discredit the story.
“What she meant was that I don’t drink alcohol,” Trump told the New York Post. “So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if that happened, I would very likely become an alcoholic. I’ve said that about myself many times, and I do. That’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said.
“I’ve said that about myself many times,” the president added. “Luckily, I can’t drink. If I could, I’d say yes, because I’ve said it before. I mean, what’s the word? Not possessive, but possessive and addictive type of personality. Oh, I’ve said it so many times before.”
According to an article in Vanity Fair, Wiles’ father, former NFL announcer Pat Summerall, was an alcoholic who had been sober for 21 years before his death in 2013. “High-functioning alcoholics and regular alcoholics exaggerate their personalities when they drink,” Wiles told Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple.
President Trump, whose younger brother Fred was an alcoholic, is famous for not drinking alcohol. But Wiles said the president was acting with what she called an “alcoholic personality,” meaning he was acting as if there was “nothing he couldn’t do.”
“Nothing, zero, nothing,” Wiles said.
The Vanity Fair article is based on several interviews Mr. Wiles conducted with Mr. Whipple, a prominent biographer of the White House chief of staff, over the year.
Mr. Wiles told the magazine that Mr. Trump had a general agreement not to reconcile with his critics and political opponents during his first 90 days in office, but chose not to object as Mr. Trump ramped up the investigation.
Wiles also said that Vice President J.D. Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for 10 years.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely blanked” on the first release of documents about alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, she said.
The White House did not dispute the accuracy of the quote, but argued that the statement was taken out of context and that other comments praising the administration were not included in the article.
“I don’t read Vanity Fair, but she did a great job,” Trump told the Post. “From what I’ve heard, the facts are wrong and I think it was a very misguided interviewer and was deliberately misguided.”
Wiles criticized the social media article as a “dishonestly constructed hit piece” about her, Trump and his Cabinet.
“Important context was ignored and much of what I and others said about our team and our president was left out of the story,” Wiles said in a statement. “After reading it, I believe this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic negative narrative about the president and our team.”
X Contact Joey Garrison at @joeygarrison.
