Epstein Friday is coming and everyone’s donning their stab vests.
Trump's chief of staff Susie Wiles offered a remarkably candid window into a presidency she described, repeatedly, as driven by impulse and a widening view of executive power … Where’s Kristi Gnome when you have to deal with junkyard dogs?
The enabler-in-chief of staff got her Vanity Fair interview as well as a piece by Peter Baker, Theo’s dad, in the NY Times.
“I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio told me. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.” Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
It’s been a busy year. Trump and his team have expanded the limits of presidential power, unilaterally declared war on drug cartels, imposed tariffs according to whim, sealed the southern border, achieved a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, and pressured NATO allies into increasing their defense spending.
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In the West Wing, Wiles is surrounded by young MAGA men. “She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, said James Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.” Indeed, Wiles has seemed content to let her pit bulls—deputy chiefs of staff Miller, Blair, and Dan Scavino—run loose as she watches.
www.vanityfair.com/...
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
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Marco Rubio told Chris Whipple what he has said publicly, that “if JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Still, the underlying tension came through when Mr. Vance posed for the magazine’s photographer. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Mr. Vance joked. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”
www.nytimes.com/...
as it’s said about sending your sinuses to Arizona, it’s a dry drunk
