Tuesday morning brought a new fresh hell—a Vanity Fair piece about Susie Wiles and the inner workings of the President Grievance administration. The initial reports were that she took shots at JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the president himself, and the initial reaction was bewilderment that someone as supposedly savvy as Wiles would get caught in trap set by Vanity Fair.
My initial impression of the whole thing was that it was a bunch of people reenacting the plot of Mean Girls. Having read the article, I still feel the same way.
It seems clear that although she really doesn’t have any control over the president, Wiles is Regina and her sniping and insults about her coworkers is just her exerting her influence over everyone else. Josh Marshall gets close to the dynamics of the interview in his piece on Tuesday:
In a way, she became the person who could make the trains of chaos run on time. I think it is mostly that, or largely that. But I also don’t think we can separate it from that process of enervation we all see before our eyes.
This is most likely true even if I’d say that she hasn’t been successful enough in keeping those trains on track.
But note also the other big element in these quotes released by the Vanity Fair PR machine.
If I’m not mistaken, Wiles seems to have tried to warn Trump off of his wildest and most malevolent actions. She tried. And she wants us to know she tried. Indeed, the second point is probably more certain and significant than the first.
And I agree with this—she definitely wants us to know that she’s been there, attempting to keep everything running.
But she’s not reassuring us that she’s keeping him from doing worse things—she’s totally on board with whatever horrible thing he wants to do. Instead, she’s telling future clients that her failure in keeping the president in line isn’t her fault and she’s definitely worth the fees she’s going to charge to manage campaigns once she’s done with this administration.
Reading the whole article points up just how tawdry Wiles really is. It really shatters the idea she’s this this even-handed arbiter. Yes, it’s probably true that she’s able to remain calm in the face of the president’s fits of anger or the weird egos of the people who orbit him. But that’s only because she’s just another MAGA weirdo, with the same off-putting behaviors as people like Musk or Vance.
For example, this passage is just beyond depressing:
Wiles says she’d originally planned to serve as chief for six months. “I have not had a day I would describe as overwhelming, though there’s plenty of frustration here. But you go to bed at night, you say your prayers, and you get up and do it again.” I asked her about her health and the president’s. “Mine is good,” she said. “His is great. My kids are grown. I’m divorced. This is what I do if I stay four years.”
“This is what I do”. Who wants to live a life like that? A weirdo does. A weirdo who wants to hurt people does. And that’s who Wiles is.
We learn about her bleak life after she’s told numerous lies in the story. Here are a few:
Not long after the El Salvador deportation fiasco, in Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers, along with their children, ages seven, four, and two, to Honduras. The children were US citizens and the four-year-old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn’t explain it.
“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said of the case, in which both mothers had reportedly been arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings. “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
Now a person with normal emotions would have found out what happened and made it right. But not Susie.
How about this whopper about Ghislaine Maxwell?:
Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)
How about this straight up lying about the pardoned J6ers?:
Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.)
Wiles is no better than the rest of them. The interview was her reminding everyone she is the Queen Bee. It’s a game to her–the whole thing: the Mean Girls snipes, the endless lies to the reporter, all of it. And then she got the president to force all of them to defend her for her own amusement.
This is high school behavior. Wiles isn’t a super genius. She’s a horrible person who wanted attention. We deserve better as a nation.
This seems right:
