Trump Chief Of Staff Susie Wiles Says JD Vance Has 'Been a Conspiracy Theorist For a Decade'

Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump's chief of staff, said Vice President JD Vance has been a "conspiracy theorist" for a decade and his embrace of the president has been "sort of political" because he was running for Senate.

Speaking to Vanity Fair across 11 interviews throughout the administration, Wiles gave a series of candid assessments of top officials in the administration. She claimed Trump has an "alcoholic's personality" and Russel Vought, architect of Project 2025 is a "right-wing absolute zealot."

She also said Elon Musk is an "avowed ketamine" user, even though she doesn't have first hand knowledge of it, and described him as an "odd, odd duck."

Elsewhere in the interview, Wiles recalled urging Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters of the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and sought to get him to delay his tariffs because of a "huge disagreement" among his advisers.

Wiles has been credited with running a more disciplined operation in the Trump administration than in his first term. She attributed her ability to work with the president to growing up with an alcoholic father.

"High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink," she said in a passage of the interviews. "And so I'm a little bit of an expert in big personalities," she added, noting that Trump operates with a "view that there's nothing he can't do."

Wiles also said that she told Trump that his second presidency should not be a retribution tour, and that they had a "loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over."

That has not happened, and while she said in August that she didn't think Trump was on a "retribution tour," he was aiming at people who did "bad things" to him. "In some cases, it may look like retribution," she noted, "and there may be an element of that from time to time." "Who would blame him? Not me."