TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The most powerful person in the Trump administration, next to the president, is someone you may never have heard of or seen. That is, until yesterday, when a long article about her was published on the Vanity Fair website. And it surprised a lot of people because behind the scenes is where she typically wants to be. Now she's all over the news. She's Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump's White House chief of staff and the first woman ever to serve as a presidential chief of staff.
The article was written by my guest, Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple, who managed to do 11 interviews with her over the past year. He'll tell us about what she had to say about subjects ranging from why she says Trump has an alcoholic's personality, even though he's not a drinker, the deal she made with Trump that he'd end his revenge tour in 90 days - he didn't - her take on several members of the cabinet, including Vice President JD Vance, who she says has been a conspiracy theorist for 10 years, and how she justifies U.S. strikes on Venezuelan boats that have so far killed 87 people. Whipple's piece, titled "Eye Of The Hurricane," will be published in the magazine's winter issue in January.
Whipple is the author of the books "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History" and "The Gatekeepers," about White House chiefs of staff. Before we hear the interview I recorded with Whipple yesterday morning, let's listen to a mix of clips from Trump and Wiles.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I want to thank the great chief of staff - most powerful woman anywhere in the world, they say. She got - the most powerful woman in the world. One phone call, and a group of people - I better not say it. I was going to say, one phone call and a country is wiped out, but we're not going to say that...
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: ...Because we're a peace-loving nation. We are a peace-loving nation. Susie Wiles. Where are you, Susie?
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: There she is.
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SUSIE WILES: The people that came before me - all men, as you know - had a dinner for me in November last year. And they said, it's so stressful. You'll be so tired. Be sure you pace yourself. Be sure you, you know, are good to yourself, and all that kind of thing. And I thought, what am I getting into, right?
KIMBERLY FLETCHER: (Laughter).
DEBBIE KRAULIDIS: I might not even sign up for this, right?
WILES: And I'm older than all of them. Not now, but when they were in this job. And I have not had that. I keep thinking that's going to happen to me. I love coming to work every day, and I'm not just saying that. I love coming to work every day. I love Donald Trump. I love working for him, and all my people around us - they're fantastic. We couldn't have assembled a better team, and they are so devoted to our cause. It's a joy to be there.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: So Susie Trump. Do you know Susie Trump?
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Yeah.
TRUMP: Sometimes referred to as Susie Wiles. Susie Trump.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Yeah.
TRUMP: She's the great chief of staff at the - they don't use the word chief of staff anymore because of - the Indians got extremely upset.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: But now the Indians actually want their name used, which is true. They never didn't want it used. But the chief of staff, and she's fantastic. She said, we have to start campaigning, sir. I said, I won. What do I have to do already? They said, we have to win the midterms, and you're the guy that's going to take us over the midterm.
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WILES: 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.
KRAULIDIS: Right.
WILES: That is really all you can ask of a boss.
KRAULIDIS: And he values your voice, your advice, correctly.
WILES: He does...
KRAULIDIS: Yeah.
WILES: ...I think. I hope he does.
GROSS: So those clips of Susie Wiles are from her interview last week on the streaming show "The Mom VIEW" on YouTube. The Trump clips are from last June and then last week at his rally in Pennsylvania.
Chris Whipple, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
CHRIS WHIPPLE: Great to be back.
GROSS: Any reaction to what you just heard?
WHIPPLE: Well, first of all, how rare is it to hear Susie Wiles' voice? I mean, it's just so unusual, and that's because she has this kind of under-the-radar role in the Trump White House. My other reaction is, have you ever heard Trump speak about anyone else the way he speaks about Susie Wiles? She has a kind of magic with him. It's what Marco Rubio told me is earned trust, quote-unquote. It's not only because she ran his against-all-odds presidential campaign in 2024, but because she has this unique relationship.
GROSS: What is your reaction to him saying that she's the most powerful woman in the world and with one call could - what did he say? - demolish the country? I mean, what? I can't imagine how she would react to that.
WHIPPLE: Well, it's Trumpian, isn't it? I mean, it's the kind of thing that she is accustomed to hearing. It's part of this magic that she has with Trump. She takes this stuff in stride. I mean, any traditional, conventional White House chief of staff would be in the Oval Office 10 minutes after a comment like that, saying, seriously, Mr. President? Look, let's avoid using that kind of rhetoric. Susie is inclined to give Trump a long leash when it comes to all kinds of remarks that would be - previously be considered beyond the pale by a president.
GROSS: She is a very behind-the-scenes person. How did you get access to her?
WHIPPLE: You know, every once in a while in a reporter's career, lightning strikes, and I really feel this was an example of that. It began way back in January and lasted for 11 months, right up until this week. I was struck by how remarkably unguarded and candid she was. We talked mostly about the campaign at that point. This was 10 days before Trump's inauguration, more or less. But everything was - nearly everything was off the record. And I can tell you, as someone who wrote a book about the Biden White House, that this is extraordinarily rare. Senior White House officials almost always speak to you on background. They require quotation approval. They're hardly ever on the record.
GROSS: On January 11, she told you that she was determined to show the world a new Trump. She said, I told Hakeem Jeffries, you will see a different Donald Trump when he gets there - to the White House. I haven't seen him throw anything. I've not seen him scream. I didn't see that really horrific behavior that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago.
She's seen it now.
WHIPPLE: Well, she's seen it now. And she saw it famously back in 2016, in the fall of that year, when at one point, Donald Trump called her to his golf club. At this point, she was working on his campaign on Florida. And he, in front of a bunch of cronies, proceeded to verbally abuse her to a fare-thee-well. She said that she wanted to just break down and cry. She instead steeled herself and told Donald Trump that, if you want to win Florida, I can do that - I'm paraphrasing now - but if you want someone who sets their hair on fire, I'm not your girl. And with that, she stood up, and she turned on her heel and departed.
Trump called her every day thereafter, she says, and he got the message. He needed Florida and he needed Susie Wiles, and she never looked back. By 2024, she was the co-chair of his presidential campaign, ran a brilliant against-all-odds campaign, was undoubtedly first among equals running that campaign. And I think Donald Trump would not be president if not for Susie Wiles.
GROSS: One of the things she told you is that she and Trump had an agreement that his revenge tour would be over in 90 days. And it's been considerably longer than that that he's in the White House. Tell us more about what she said about the revenge tour.
WHIPPLE: I found this absolutely extraordinary, and it really is almost the arc of the Vanity Fair piece and the arc of the journey that I took with Susie Wiles from - it was Day 56 of the Trump presidency. I said to her, look, Susie, do you ever go into the Oval and sit the president down and say, look, why don't we cut out this revenge and retribution and focus on governing? And she said, yes, I've had that conversation. And she said, we have a loose agreement that the revenge and retribution will end - I'm paraphrasing now - after 90 days. Well, six months later, seven months later - don't hold me to the exact day - I said, you remember when you told me months ago that you had an agreement that this would end after 90 days? And she said, oh, well, I don't think he's on a retribution tour. But when I pressed her again, she confessed that the Letitia James case, for example - oh, well, that would be one, a case of retribution.
So it's been this kind of journey from Susie Wiles thinking initially, early on, that she could have these discussions with Trump and get him to agree to these things. But in the course of this yearlong journey as White House chief of staff, I could see that by the end, she was all in. She was all in not only on MAGA, but she was all in on pursuing Trump's enemies, having them prosecuted. And I don't think that was the case initially. I think she knew that this would be a problem.
GROSS: So are you saying that the more she saw of him in his second term, the more she started following through on his actions and supporting his beliefs?
WHIPPLE: I can't read her mind, Terry, but what I do find really fascinating is that these kinds of conversations that she seemed to be having early on with Trump - for example, on Day 1, she argued with him that, are you sure you want to pardon all of the January 6 protesters? And she said, maybe we should be more selective. She lost that argument. She had a so-called promise, a loose agreement, as she put it, that the revenge and retribution would end after 90 days. They had that conversation. She seemed to be trying to act as - at least tap the brakes on some of Trump's excesses and, you know, overreach. But by now, I think, many months later - we're now approaching the first anniversary of Trump 2.0 - I think those conversations are few and far between. And those are the kinds of conversations, in my view, that a White House chief of staff must have to fulfill the most important duty, which is telling the president what he doesn't want to hear. She's doing less and less of that, I'm afraid.
GROSS: Well, she tells you she sees her job, you know, as fulfilling his mission and that the American people elected him, and her job is to help him achieve his agenda.
WHIPPLE: Yeah, she does. She does say that. But at the same time, she - you know, she loves to quote James A. Baker III, who was Ronald Reagan's quintessential White House chief. And nobody was better than Baker at telling Ronald Reagan what he didn't want to hear. And I - so I think that's the part of it that she's missing. I mean, JD Vance said to me that her philosophy of being White House chief of staff is - just as you said, it's to facilitate the president's vision. He said in the first term, White House chiefs, we're trying to look out for the national interest and rein Trump in and all of this, and he regarded that as nonsense. And Susie's done the diametrically opposite thing, which is help the president fulfill his agenda.
Having written a book about White House chiefs and having interviewed every living chief at one point, here's what's missing. You cannot fulfill the president's vision. You cannot facilitate it without steering him clear of land mines. You have to be able to have the tough conversations. And to give just one example, when James A. Baker III, Reagan's White House chief, swapped jobs with Don Regan, it was no coincidence that shortly thereafter, we had the Iran-Contra affair. The White House chief has to be able to tell the president, you cannot go down this road. Believe me, it's a mistake.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. His two-part series on White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is available on Vanity Fair's website and will be on the newsstand next month. We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're talking to Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. He interviewed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles multiple times in the last year and has a new two-part portrait of her that's on Vanity Fair's website and will be in the magazine next month. The article is titled "Eye Of The Hurricane." Our interview was recorded yesterday.
She helped him pick a Cabinet of hard-liners, you write. Does she see herself as a hard-liner?
WHIPPLE: I don't think she does. I don't think she's an ideologue. I think she would regard herself as a kind of Jim Baker-style pragmatist trying again to facilitate the president's vision, execute his agenda, play honest broker, all of those things that White House chiefs - the good ones - traditionally have been. She doesn't insert herself, assert herself or express her opinion all that often about policy of any kind. When she does, Trump listens. And he would turn to Susie after Vance and Rubio and Miller and the others had had their say and say, Susie, what do you think? And rarely would she express her own opinion that differed from the consensus, but when she did, he listened.
GROSS: You mentioned Vance. She describes Vance as having been a conspiracy theorist for a decade. Was she referring to in the past or when he was chosen as Trump's running mate?
WHIPPLE: Oh, no. I think, to this day, she considers him a real conspiracy theorist. And she's really talking about all the way back to 2016, that for a decade, Vance has been that way, and she says he'd be the first to admit it.
GROSS: So does she have faith in him as a conspiracy theorist?
WHIPPLE: She does have faith in JD Vance. She thinks he's doing a terrific job. She's a JD Vance fan. She's also a Rubio fan. But she makes this fascinating distinction between the two of them, because I asked her. I said, what about this 180 -degree conversion from Never Trumpers to Trump acolytes that both Rubio and Vance seem to have made. And she said about Rubio that his was really principled, that Rubio - you know, it took him time to get there, but it was a genuine kind of ideological conversion to Trumpism. But by contrast, she suggested that JD Vance was - well, he was running for the Senate, and it was "sort of political," quote-unquote. Sort of political was her view of JD Vance's 180-degree about-face from someone who once called Trump America's Hitler to being all-in.
GROSS: Also, she calls Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and current director of the Office of Management and Budget - she calls him a right-wing zealot. Did you say any more about why she calls him that?
WHIPPLE: Yeah, a right-wing, absolute zealot, as a matter of fact, I think, was the exact quote. You know what? That's not necessarily an insult in the Trump White House. I think that she did have her differences with Russell Vought early on. And there was a memo that the Office of Management and Budget put out - this was even before a vote was confirmed, but presumably with his blessing, that made draconian cuts in grants, federal grants, and was clearly a mistake and was Vought getting out over his skis. And she quietly revoked that memo. So she clearly regards Russell Vought as a real MAGA hard-liner, a zealot, as she put it, but I'm not sure if she holds it against him. I mean, I think that she thinks that this is an extraordinarily competent Cabinet. A lot of people would say the opposite.
But she believes in what she calls disruptors. She thinks Pete Hegseth is one and that the Defense Department needed that. She refers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as my Bobby, quirky Bobby, but just what the doctor ordered for HHS - a kind of shock treatment. So, look, she's all-in with this very hard-line Cabinet.
GROSS: She helped Trump choose the Cabinet members. So that would make me think she was a hard-liner at the very beginning of his presidency.
WHIPPLE: I think what she believed in above all, Terry, was she wanted Trump to be able to have the people he wanted, the team that he wanted. And I think she would also subscribe to the view among a lot of the Trump White House, the current Trump White House, that the problem during Trump 1.0, his first term, was that you had all of these independent-minded people like General Mattis and John Kelly and others who were telling Trump what he couldn't do, trying to keep - put him in a kind of straitjacket. And I think she was determined to help Trump pick the people who would execute his agenda in his view and in her view. I think - but I don't think it's ideological. I think it was tactical in that sense.
GROSS: So she sees herself as Trump's enabler in that respect and occasionally trying to put on the brakes.
WHIPPLE: Well, she would fiercely contest that. She would argue with you about whether she's an "enabler," quote-unquote. And I'll tell you, I interviewed Leon Panetta, whom I've known for a long time. He was Bill Clinton's extremely effective and empowered White House chief of staff. He really turned the Clinton White House around, in my view, very much up there with Jim Baker as the gold standard. And I asked him about Wiles. And he said - he's never met her, but from a distance, he couldn't decide whether she was an enabler or someone who was trying to be a disciplinarian and help Trump do the right thing. Well, when I repeated this to Susie Wiles, I got a real rise out of her. Her response was, paraphrasing now, but, I'm not an enabler, and I'm not a b**** and, in fact, that she doesn't, you know, assert herself unnecessarily, in her view. So that was her response, and I thought it was telling.
GROSS: We have to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. His two-part series on White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is titled "Eye Of The Hurricane." It's available on Vanity Fair's website and will be on newsstands next month. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview that I recorded yesterday with Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. He interviewed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles multiple times in the last year and now has a two-part portrait of her that's on Vanity Fair's website and will be in the magazine next month. It's titled "Eye Of The Hurricane." Whipple is also the author of the 2025 book "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History." His other books include "The Gatekeepers," about White House chiefs of staff.
You spoke to Wiles about the U.S. strikes against boats from Venezuela. What does she have to say about that?
WHIPPLE: Well, she is all for it. She is in complete support of the president's policy. She insists that these boats - because the CIA can do remarkable things, she insists that these are drug dealers on these boats. I asked her - I went to see her. I think - I'm pretty sure it was on November 4, just last month. And on that day, she'd just come out of a meeting with the president, talking about the Venezuela policy and the lethal strikes on boats, and she said, words to this effect. He wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle. Which of course, really contradicts the official administration policy that this is all about stopping illegal drugs from reaching U.S. shores and not about regime change. So I found that a remarkable statement. But she certainly doesn't have any qualms about the policy. Although she also makes a somewhat newsworthy admission, which is that she says that land strikes by the U.S. on Venezuela would require going to Congress. Trump has said the opposite, you know, that land strikes could be imminent.
GROSS: When she says, until Maduro cries uncle, it's ambiguous to me whether she means until he gives in and does more to stop the drug trade or if it means until he gives up the presidency and is, you know, replaced.
WHIPPLE: Well, I suppose you could argue that that's what she meant. That's not the way I took it. It seemed to me - it certainly sounded to me as though they really feel that they could force Maduro out.
GROSS: And one of the ways she justifies what's being done is that the boats that we fire missiles at are in international waters. Therefore, it's not a war crime. But does it matter if you're shooting people who are criminals? That's not grounds for execution and might still be a war crime, even if it's in international waters, where no country's individual laws apply.
WHIPPLE: She says a couple of things, and they're not always consistent. But one of the things she said was that we can strike - I mean, I'm paraphrasing now - but the U.S. is entitled to strike even within territorial waters because they're evading detection, and therefore, presumably they're guilty of drug smuggling. So she said that - as though Trump could simply go ahead and order these strikes with impunity.
But I really did have a very pointed exchange with her about the whole Venezuela policy - or the blowing up of boats, these lethal strikes. And I don't think she had a very convincing answer. I mean, we had an exchange about it, and she said, well, we're fighting a war. It's a war against these drug smugglers, to which I replied, well, yeah, but it's a war only in the president's opinion. He has - he doesn't have congressional approval. And she said, well, we don't need it. She said, we only need it if we're going to do land strikes. But we did have some really pointed exchanges. And again, it was just remarkable to me that she was willing to really answer, or at least attempt to answer, any question I threw at her. And I give her credit for that.
GROSS: Susie Wiles described Trump as having an alcoholic's personality. And she grew up with her father, Pat Summerall, who had become famous because he was a kicker with the New York Giants and then became known as the voice of the NFL as a broadcaster. So she is familiar with what an alcoholic's personality is, if there is any one singular personality. What did she mean when she described Trump as having an alcoholic's personality? Because he's always said he never even had a drink.
WHIPPLE: Yeah. It's got nothing to do with drinking. What she really means by that is this notion, this grandiose notion, that he can do anything. Nothing is beyond his ability to achieve. It's a larger-than-life confidence, not always grounded in fact. I don't think she would say that. But I think what she would say is that growing up with an alcoholic father, father for whom she had to lead interventions with her mother to get him into treatment - Pat Summerall was sober for the last 21 years of his life. But it was a hard-earned kind of boot camp for her in dealing with larger-than-life men with difficult personalities. And she, of course, went on to run Ron DeSantis' successful campaign for governor of Florida in 2018 and, of course, is famously now Donald Trump's White House chief of staff.
She'd be the first to tell you that - in fact, she said to me, I'm kind of an expert at that. I specialize in it, she said, about dealing with men with big personalities. Part of the fascination, I think, of her relationship with her father, Pat Summerall, is that she bonded with Trump because she knew all about - not only was she a sports junkie, which Trump loves to talk about, but she absorbed the zeitgeist of 1970s Manhattan, and she - that whole bygone era of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. And she could talk with Trump about stuff like that, which he just loves. And it was part of their bonding experience.
GROSS: So Trump was a big admirer of Pat Summerall, Wiles' father. And the first time Trump met Susie Wiles, he said to her, I judge people by their genes.
WHIPPLE: Absolutely. I mean, Susie Wiles told me if she's heard it once, she's heard it 100 times. Trump judges people by their genes - G-E-N-E-S. You know, look, I don't think it's a coincidence that Bobby Kennedy Jr. is head of HHS. Trump loves having a Kennedy in his cabinet. He loved having - being in the room with the daughter of the great Pat Summerall, who was kind of a mini John Madden when it came to reeling off scores of football games from bygone days. He loves that stuff. But he really does believe in two things above all, Trump, somebody once told me - winning and genes.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. His two-part series on White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is available on Vanity Fair's website and will be on the newsstand next month. We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THIRD WORLD LOVE'S "SEFARAD")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're talking to Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. He interviewed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles multiple times in the last year and has a new two-part portrait of her that's on Vanity Fair's website and will be in the magazine next month. The article is titled "Eye Of The Hurricane." Our interview was recorded yesterday.
So what does she think about Elon Musk and how he handled DOGE?
WHIPPLE: Wiles told me that she was initially distraught, as she put it, when she learned that Elon Musk, as part of this kind of scorched-earth cost-cutting campaign known as DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, had in effect burned USAID to the ground. This is the Trump modus operandi. You know, he - he's done it in business, and he certainly did it in the Trump White House. And she paints this vivid picture of this odd duck, as she put it, who was up all night, slept during the day in a sleeping bag in the Executive Office Building across from the White House, like some kind of jacked-up Nosferatu.
But she was really aghast when she discovered that not only was he cutting stuff that the Trump White House wanted cut, what they considered wasteful, but also vital lifesaving immunization programs in Africa. Not only that, but PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush with $15 billion back in the early 2000s - that program was gutted. She began to get phone calls from relief agencies, former officials, saying that lives were in the balance. She called Musk in, tried to fix this. And she knew that fixing it was on her, that Trump couldn't be bothered. Trump didn't really care what was going on in the so-called smaller agencies, as she put it.
GROSS: Let's talk about the Epstein files. Tell us what you learned about what happened in the inner circle when they did want to release it and when they didn't want to release it. The general outline of this has been, you know, revealed, but you may know stuff through Susie Wiles that others haven't reported yet.
WHIPPLE: Well, this is absolutely fascinating. Susie Wiles told me she has read the Epstein file, quote-unquote, as she calls it, and she says Trump is in it. He's all over it, but not doing anything awful, as she put it. People can draw their own conclusions as to what she means by that. She says in so many words that, you know, he knew - obviously, he knew Epstein. She said, I know it's kind of an outmoded word, but they were playboys together running around in South Florida during this period of time. But she also says, really interestingly, that there's nothing incriminating on Bill Clinton in the files and that Trump is wrong about that - was wrong about that when he said repeatedly that Clinton had gone to Epstein's Caribbean island, Little Saint James, quote, "supposedly 28 times," end quote, as Trump once said. So she said the president was wrong about that.
It's not clear exactly why the Trump White House has not released the files. But there are plenty of theories, including the fact that Trump is obviously in those files. But what Wiles did tell me was that she thought that Pam Bondi had whiffed, as she put it, on the handling of all of this. You may recall Bondi called in a bunch of social media influencers who were passionate about this issue and presented them with binders full of, quote, "nothingness," as Susie Wiles put it. So she was quite candid about how she felt about Pam Bondi's mishandling of this. She says that JD Vance and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino - vice president, head of the FBI and deputy head - were all for getting the files out. And as you know, on December 19, that's the deadline for another release. Certainly, Susie Wiles doesn't think that there's going to be anything earthshaking in the files to come.
GROSS: So tell us about the trip that two high-powered people in the Trump administration took to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, the close associate of Epstein who enabled his rendezvous with young women and seemed to be part of the sex trafficking ring.
WHIPPLE: Yeah. So Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's partner in crime, as it were. She was accused of procuring these underage women and sex trafficking them for Epstein. She was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. And during this whole recent flap during the Trump administration over the release of the files, Todd Blanche was suddenly dispatched to go and interview her in a courthouse in Florida. So I said to Susie Wiles, it's not typical, is it, to send the No. 2 person at the Department of Justice, who happens to be the president's former defense attorney, to go and interview a convicted sex trafficker in prison? And she said, well, it was Blanche's suggestion. It was his idea, in effect. She also said that she and the president had no advance knowledge that Maxwell would be moved from this prison to a less secure - what some have called a kind of Club Fed prison. She insists that not only did they not know in advance, but the president was ticked off, as she put it. She then said, if you want to know more about this, I'll find out. We've had several subsequent interviews, but to date, before the story closed, she had not found out. So here we are.
GROSS: Or she's not telling you.
WHIPPLE: Or she's not telling me. Yeah.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. His two-part series on White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is available on Vanity Fair's website and will be on the newsstand next month. We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BENJI MERRISON AND WILL SLATER'S "BETWEEN FEEDS/AMOROUS PEACOCK")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're talking to Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. He interviewed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles multiple times in the last year and has a new two-part portrait of her that's on Vanity Fair's website and will be in the magazine next month. The article is titled "Eye Of The Hurricane." Our interview was recorded yesterday.
Just to set the scene for a little bit, like, when you interviewed her, there was a big hole where the East Wing of the White House used to be. And you also mentioned that there's a giant screen with a constant flow of Trump's Truth Social posts, his social media posts on his own platform. This was in her office?
WHIPPLE: So I met Wiles. She was in the Oval Office when I arrived. She excused herself and met me in her office, and we had lunch from the White House mess and talked about all kinds of things, including the elections. She knew they were going to have a rough night, and the GOP certainly did. They got routed, as you know. So we talked about that. We talked about Maduro and Venezuela policy. We talked about all kinds of things.
And at one point, I said to her - this was just days after the demolition of the East Wing, and I said, were you surprised by the reaction? You know, the fierce criticism of demolishing the East Wing for Trump's 90,000-foot ballroom. And she said, no, they weren't surprised at all. Trump was determined to just forge ahead. And then she said, but I think you need to judge it in its entirety. In other words, judge the White House renovation in its entirety. And I said, what do you mean? She said, well, there are other things that he's planning. And I said, like what? And she said, I'm not telling.
And anyway, as I was leaving, I noticed that there is a big monitor just to the left of the wood-burning fireplace in that corner office, where the White House chiefs reside. And on that feed is a constant live feed of Trump's Truth Social posts.
GROSS: Is that for staffers who are trying to keep him in check with his social media posts?
WHIPPLE: You know, I didn't ask her specifically about that. I think it's - look, my guess is it's a little bit like having just a monitor of what the president is up to.
GROSS: Is she concerned about how his popularity is dropping?
WHIPPLE: She would tell you that she doesn't care about approval ratings. Whether you believe that or not is up to you. But she is emphatic about the notion that approval ratings change rapidly. The only approval rating that counts is a couple of weeks out from a midterm. For example, in this case, 2026. She is convinced - I said to her, how do you think you'll do in the midterms? And she said, we're going to win the midterms flatly. Well, that would be something because, as you know, history says that incumbent presidents suffer shellackings, as Barack Obama famously put it, in midterms. And this one - all the smart money would say this one will be no different and perhaps even worse for Trump than usual.
By contrast, I will tell you, I asked JD Vance about this. And he said he thought that an incumbent president could be expected to lose as many as 13 seats in the House and two or three in the Senate, and he thought they'd do better than that. Now, you can take that any way you like, but that sure sounds to me like JD Vance trying to lower expectations before 2026.
GROSS: Did she tell you anything about her perceptions of Trump's physical health, his mental health or his seemingly erratic behavior?
WHIPPLE: I did talk to her about all of the above. Some of it was off the record. On the record, she insists that he is fine. She says, my health is good. His health is great. I should be so lucky, in effect. When I pressed her about Trump's tendency to fall asleep during Cabinet meetings - you may recall the time when Marco Rubio gave a kind of dear-leader speech right next to him, and he seemed to be sound asleep. Susie Wiles insists that he's closing his eyes, period, full stop. He's not sleeping. Even if it looks to all the world as though he's sleeping, he's actually just closing his eyes. So when I pressed her about Donald Trump's increasing tendency to lash out and verbally abuse women who challenge him - and in particular, that case where he snapped at a female Bloomberg reporter, quiet, piggy - her response to that was, he's a counterpuncher. And increasingly in this world, women are doing the punching.
That was her answer.
GROSS: And what about his cognitive or mental health?
WHIPPLE: Again, Susie Wiles would have you believe that Trump is cognitively fine. I never got any indication from her that she felt any differently.
GROSS: So what was your final impression of Susie Wiles?
WHIPPLE: I just think it's been fascinating because Trump, famously or infamously, went through four White House chiefs of staff in his first term - Reince Priebus, John Kelly and all the others. And Susie Wiles has what none of them had, which is Trump's ear and Trump's trust. She is without a doubt the second most powerful person in the Trump White House, other than the president himself.
And given that influence that Susie Wiles has with Trump, which no one else does, it really makes you wonder if history might be different if she used that influence to tell the president hard truths - to walk into the Oval Office, close the door and say, Mr. President, you cannot or should not go down this road. We just don't know the answer to that question because, by her own admission, she's not doing that. She's not having those hard conversations. She admitted to me that - she said, you know, other White House former chiefs have told me about these seminal moments when they've gone in and said to the president, you know, this is unconstitutional. I don't have those, she said. Well, what if she did? Maybe Trump would go on his way and be undeterred, but we don't know because I'm not sure she's tried.
GROSS: Chris Whipple, thank you so much for talking with us.
WHIPPLE: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
GROSS: Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple's profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, titled "Eye Of The Hurricane," was published yesterday on Vanity Fair's website and will be in the winter issue next month. While we were recording our interview yesterday morning, Wiles responded to Whipple's article, writing this on X, formerly Twitter.
Quote, "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. Significant context was disregarded, and much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team. The truth is, the Trump White House has already accomplished more in 11 months than any other president has accomplished in eight years. And that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade. None of us will stop our relentless pursuit of making America great again," unquote.
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Lucy Liu joins us to talk about "Rosemead," in which Liu stars as a terminally ill woman grappling with her teenage son's escalating mental health crisis and the impossible choices she faces to protect him. It's based on a true story. She'll talk about the movie and her decades-long career. I hope you'll join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESSICA WILLIAMS' "BEMSHA SWING")
GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @npfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with assistance today from Diana Martinez. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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