US President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has called Vice President JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist", Elon Musk an “odd duck” and said “no rational person” could endorse how the tech titan dismantled USAID.
In a bombshell interview with Vanity Fair, Ms Wiles, 68, also criticised Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and offered an unvarnished take on her boss.
Describing Mr Musk as an “odd, odd duck” and an “avowed” ketamine user, she criticised his department Doge's shutdown of the USAID international aid agency.
“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody,” Vanity Fair quoted her as saying.
Ms Wiles said she called Mr Musk out on the issue after Doge closed USAID offices and summarily dismissed thousands of employees.
“You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him, according to the magazine.
Vanity Fair quoted Ms Wiles as saying that Mr Trump, while a non-drinker, has “an alcoholic's personality", and “operates [with] a view that there's nothing he can't do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Mr Trump, 79, is teetotal. His brother Fred was an alcoholic and died of a heart attack aged 42.
In the wide-ranging series of interviews, Ms Wiles said she was “not an enabler” to the President, who has unleashed an unprecedented display of power since his return to the office in January.
She praised the “core team” of Mr Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, but said Mr Vance had been a “a conspiracy theorist for a decade", when talking about the Epstein scandal.
Ms Wiles also called Mr Vance's change from an avowed opponent of Mr Trump, who he once compared to Hitler, to a loyal follower as “sort of political.”
She had barbed comments for Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying she “completely whiffed” the promised release to right-wing influencers of documents about the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Epstein.
Mr Vance called her the “best White House chief of staff that I think the President could ask for".
In a post on X, Ms Wiles said the Vanity Fair story lacked context, calling it a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff and Cabinet in history"
