Donald Trump’s chief of staff has given an interview to Vanity Fair that is a feast of gossip and bitchiness. But it also tells us something about how foreign policy is made in the White House.
Mean Girls at the White House
Washington commentators have been comparing Susie Wiles’s interview with Vanity Fair to the scene in the 2004 film Mean Girls where Regina George reveals the contents of the burn book, a scrapbook of unkind remarks about her classmates. The White House chief of staff tells the magazine that Trump has an alcoholic’s personality, and describes JD Vance as a conspiracy theorist and Elon Musk as an “odd, odd duck” who uses ketamine, although she has no first-hand knowledge of his use of the drug.
The interview is illuminating about the way this White House works and the relationships within Trump’s team of ambitious advisers, notably Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio. It also sheds light on some of the administration’s biggest foreign policy decisions and Trump’s view of some of the principal actors.
The president claims that his lethal campaign against Venezuela – bombing boats, seizing an oil tanker and declaring the country’s airspace closed – is about stopping drug trafficking. But Wiles confirms that Trump’s real purpose is the overthrow of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro.
“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” she said.
She claims that the administration knows who they are killing in the small boats US forces are attacking in the Caribbean, although they have offered no information about the identity of the victims. But, unlike Trump, she acknowledges that he will need congressional approval to strike targets on land.
“If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress,” she said.
Wiles regrets that Trump and Vance performed their Oval Office dressing down of Volodymyr Zelenskiy in public. But she believes it was the inevitable culmination of a succession of ill-judged actions by the Ukrainian president and his entourage, starting when Zelenskiy failed to show up for a meeting with treasury secretary Scott Bessent when he visited Kyiv to make a deal on mineral rights.
“It just was a bad sort of sentiment all the way around. And I wouldn’t say JD snapped, because he’s too controlled for that. But I think he’d just had enough,” she said.
She tells the magazine that in advance of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska last August, White House advisers were divided about the Russian president’s goal in Ukraine, with some believing he would be happy if he could take all of Donetsk. But Trump himself was not convinced that Putin wanted peace.
“Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles said.
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