Suzie Wiles s Inadvertent Indictment of Trump

Suzie Wiles’s Inadvertent Indictment of Trump
Take it from his closest aide: he’s a corrupt liar
Harry Litman
Dec 23


Editorial credit: whitehouse.gov

Chris Whipple’s two-part Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles is a journalistic tour de force: roughly 30,000 words drawn from months of on-the-record conversations with the staffer who knows Donald Trump best and whom he most trusts.

Much of the extended account is designed to present Wiles as she sees herself: the steady hand, the grown-up in the room, the indispensable manager of a volatile president.

But it is not the bulk of this extraordinary reporting—or the sympathetic accounts of the president—that will endure.

What will be most remembered is a far smaller but indelible fraction of the interviews in which Wiles offers a series of unguarded, almost casual admissions about Trump that together amount to one of the most damning insider portraits of a presidency ever given. Not from a disgruntled former aide, but from Trump’s closest staffer—someone who admires him, facilitates him, and believes she has served, and is still serving him, well.

And even she says he lies to the American people and pursues reprisal prosecutions of his enemies.

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Wiles plainly has no motivation to disparage Trump. Over the course of eleven separate interviews, she comes across as relaxed, confident, often amused. And she speaks freely—about his temperament, impulses, grudges, decision-making, and her own role in managing and facilitating him.

Whipple, one of the most experienced chroniclers of White House chiefs of staff, does not editorialize. He does not push. He lets her talk, and in doing so captures something rare: an insider account that inculpates not because it is savage, but because it is unguarded and matter-of-fact.

In casual conversation, as if reciting the menu at Mar-a-Lago, Wiles concedes that Trump lied to the American people about Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton when he asserted that Clinton visited Epstein’s island dozens of times. There is no evidence that he did. Trump was, as she put it, “wrong about that.”

This admission comes amid the broader Epstein debacle, in which Trump and the administration changed its story multiple times and then, when forced to the wall, trickled out a small subset of documents curated to minimize mention of Trump, who by Wiles’s own account, was on Epstein’s plane and named in Epstein-related records.

The Epstein lie, moreover, is more than a gratuitous fib. For starters, it is a whopper—detailed and extravagant. It is vicious, aimed at scoring points against any political figure Trump wants to harm. And it carries that peculiarly Trumpian quality of turning the mirror on himself, deflecting from the fact that Trump had the close personal relationship with Epstein.

It is therefore revealing that Wiles normalizes the lie, brushing it off as a pedestrian event.

It begs the question: if Trump will lie about Epstein, what won’t he lie about?

Wiles also all but acknowledges that Trump has lied repeatedly about the grave matter of the justification for the airstrikes in the Caribbean. While he repeatedly insisted they were about drug interdiction, Wiles lets slip the actual rationale: regime change. Trump, she says, “wants to keep on blowing boats up until [Venezuelan President Nicol;s] Maduro cries uncle.”

The lies fit a pattern so entrenched that they barely register anymore. Trump’s lying did not begin in office; it has defined his political life from the start. He lied about inauguration crowd size. He lied about the 2020 election. He lies reflexively about policy successes, economic data, immigration, tariffs, Venezuela, Gaza—about virtually everything that matters. He wakes up lying and lies all day, and he will continue to do so until the end of his presidency.

But the lies are far from the most serious transgression that Wiles makes stick to Trump.

The deeper indictment concerns retribution prosecutions.

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Wiles acknowledges that Trump’s criminal cases against perceived enemies—most notably former FBI Director James Comey—appear vindictive. Asked directly why the Comey prosecution does not look like political score-settling, she responds with astonishing candor: “I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Discussing Letitia James, she adds, almost breezily: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”

That might be the one retribution. What is one little constitutional violation, one bedrock betrayal of the presidential oath of office?

Most astonishing of all is what Wiles describes next. Early in the administration, she says, she struck a “loose agreement” with Trump: the revenge tour would end after ninety days. Ninety days of score-settling, and then governance would begin. The deal was meant to temper his impulses. It failed. He broke it. But the very fact that, knowing his insatiable desire for vengeance, she tried to sell him on a three-month limit to constitutional transgressions tells you all you need to know.

The power to investigate, indict, and imprison is the most awesome authority the state possesses. In a constitutional democracy, it must never be wielded for personal or political retribution—not for ninety days, not for “one retribution.” There is no such thing as a partial or time-limited exception. I have previously called the indictments of Comey and James the single most shameful act in the Department of Justice’s history.

Yet Wiles recounts this arrangement almost ingenuously, as though it were a reasonable managerial compromise.

In my one-on-one interview with Whipple on the Talking Feds YouTube channel, which will be published tomorrow, I asked him about the apparent incongruity of Wiles’s almost offhanded admission of conduct so damning to Trump. His supposition was that Wiles occupies the same bubble that envelops the entire Trump White House—and reflexively accepts, and reproduces, the distorted logic that governs it.

Wiles’s calm acceptance of that logic is among the most unsettling features of the interviews. She is not a provocateur. She sees herself as the adult in the room—the steady hand amid chaos. And yet she describes a presidency in which constitutional violations are weighed, bargained over, postponed when convenient, but never renounced.

This is what gives Whipple’s reporting its lasting force. He does not need to supply outrage. He lets Wiles speak for herself. And in doing so, he reveals not just Trump’s pathologies—his impulsiveness, grievance-fixation, and instability—but the way the system has adapted around them. If this is how a senior insider talks—clear-eyed, unsentimental, unembarrassed—then the system has not merely tolerated abuse. It has absorbed it.

When the history of Donald Trump is written—and it cannot happen too soon—certain conclusions should be uncontested: that he was a profligate liar; that he abused the Constitution; that he sought to use the machinery of justice to punish enemies and protect himself; that he was petty, vengeful, and indifferent to democratic guardrails.

If Susie Wiles can concede all of this without even recognizing the depth of the condemnation, the problem is not simply Trump. It is the world around him: a presidency that normalizes lying, bargains over constitutional violations, a

nd treats abuses of power as management challenges rather than moral lines. History will not struggle to understand what happened here. It will struggle to understand why it was tolerated.

Talk to you later.

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