The series of interviews with White House Chief-of-Staff Susie Wiles that dropped in two parts on Tuesday, via Vanity Fair, were full of news. I wrote about some of the news she made in my last post.
But some other nuggets were significant, too. For one, Wiles shoved Vice President JD Vance under the bus and rolled it over him. She called him “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” who converted from Never Trumper to Trump supporter in a “sort of political” shift. That was unlike Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to Wiles.
From Part 2:
I asked Wiles about the remarkable 180-degree conversion of the secretary of state and the vice president from fierce Trump critics to high-ranking acolytes—and heirs apparent. Trump has floated a Vance-Rubio GOP presidential ticket in 2028. Rubio’s transformation was ideological and principled, she said: “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” By contrast, she suggested, Vance had other motivations. “His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”
As New York Times reporter Peter Baker put it, these comments were “seen as evidence that she is propping up Rubio over the “more MAGA-friendly front-runner” to be at the top of the Republican ticket in 2028. Baker also noted, “Mr. Vance joked with the Vanity Fair photographer that he would give him $1,000 if he made Mr. Rubio look worse than him.”
The article also blew a giant hole in the White House lie that Trump’s extrajudicial killings are about drugs, not regime change (though this whopper has been obvious since he pardoned the convicted mega-drug dealer and former president of Honduras).
The article's opening paragraph refers to an Oval Office meeting on November 4, with Donald Trump, Vance, Rubio, and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. “The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power,” the article states. In Part 2, Wiles said, “[Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
Speaking of White House lies, Wiles also insisted Trump has not been falling asleep, despite the obvious evidence otherwise. Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
Yeah, sure.
Then there was Wiles’ brief comment about the $300 million ballroom Trump is building, now that he has demolished the East Wing of the White House, probably illegally: “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning,” she said. When asked if that meant Trump is planning more than he has already revealed, she replied, “I’m not telling.”
Which almost certainly means, “Yes.”
What’s really shocking is how politically tone deaf this regime is. While Donald Trump builds his hideously ostentatious, gold-plated ballroom, his party is blithely destroying health insurance for millions of Americans. When asked about it, Billionaire Trump said, “Don’t make it sound so bad!”
