00:00Who should Susie Wiles blame for this dumpster fire of a Vanity Fair article?
00:06There's only one answer, herself.
00:09Wiles was reportedly told not to talk to journalist Chris Whipple, but she did it anyway.
00:15And the result is a 10,000-word profile in Vanity Fair that makes Wiles seem thirsty,
00:22incompetent, and inconsequential.
00:25Wiles has previously said she doesn't like people who want to be stars,
00:29but that's exactly what she made herself in these interviews.
00:33She said that Trump has an alcoholic personality,
00:36she painted J.D. Vance as a conspiratorial opportunist,
00:41and she called Elon Musk an odd, odd duck.
00:45Of course, Wiles disputes what she called a hit piece in an expose
00:50and said she assumed it was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic picture of the White House.
00:56But Whipple told Anderson Cooper that Wiles was on the record all the time.
01:02So she helped paint that picture she now finds so upsetting.
01:08And she can't go back now.
01:10The best chiefs of staff in the past have been able to see around corners
01:14and tell presidents what they don't want to hear.
01:17They can channel but also challenge the boss.
01:20Trump is standing by Wiles, at least for now,
01:23and many quotes in the Vanity Fair piece frame her as indispensable.
01:28Yet, the Ice Maiden, as Wiles is known,
01:32is more of an enabler to Trump than an enforcer.
01:35She consistently paints herself as unable to help steer the president in a better direction.
01:42She tried to get him to wait on the tariff rollout.
01:45That didn't happen.
01:45She was aghast at Musk's dismantling of USAID, but unable to stop it.
01:53Same with pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists.
01:57But whether the Ice Maiden is now on thin ice hardly matters.
02:02She seems mostly to be a bystander, uninterested in doing her day job,
02:08a barely-there chief of staff.
02:09And if the president ends up firing her, which seems unlikely,
02:14she would hardly be missed.
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