US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he stood by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles after she said he had an “alcoholic’s personality” in an interview with Vanity Fair.
Wiles also called US Vice President J.D. Vance a “conspiracy theorist,” branded tech tycoon Elon Musk an “odd, odd duck” and gave juicy opinions on other Trump administration figures in the lengthy piece.
Trump has previously described Wiles, the first female White House chief of staff, as the “ice maiden” and credited her for her role in driving forward his second presidency behind the scenes.
Photo: Reuters
However, the 68-year-old Wiles now finds herself firmly in the headlines after the Vanity Fair story, which the magazine said was based on a series of interviews with veteran political journalist Chris Whipple over the past year.
Wiles dismissed the article as a “disingenuously framed hit piece,” accusing the magazine of trying to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative” about Trump’s team.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the president was left out of the story,” she wrote.
Trump told the New York Post that Wiles was right to describe him as having an alcoholic’s personality — even though he is teetotaler.
“You see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said.
He added that Wiles had “done a fantastic job.”
Vanity Fair quoted Wiles — whose father, the NFL announcer Pat Summerall was an alcoholic — as saying that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
In the wide-ranging series of interviews, Wiles said she was “not an enabler” to Trump, who has unleashed an unprecedented display of presidential power since his return to power in January, adding: “I’m also not a bitch.”
However, she was forthright about Space Exploration Technologies Corp and Tesla boss Elon Musk’s role as head of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency in the first months of Trump’s term.
Describing billionaire Musk as a “complete solo actor” and “avowed” ketamine user, she criticized the department’s shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” Vanity Fair quoted her as saying.
Wiles hailed what she called a “core team” of Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, but said Vance had been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” regarding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Top Trump Cabinet members lined up to defend Wiles and lash out at the Vanity Fair piece.
Vance said in a speech in Pennsylvania that he and Wiles had “joked in private and in public” about him believing conspiracy theories.
“We have our disagreements, we agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States,” Vance said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters outside the West Wing that Wiles was “incredible” and accused Vanity Fair of the “bias of omission.”
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS