Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...

[admin]

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115724141568860081

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

Dec 15, 2025, 6:51 AM

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SHOCKING: Trump CELEBRATES tragedy involving Rob Reiner
Brian Tyler Cohen
Dec 15, 2025 Brian Tyler Cohen

This is just the beginning. And people have to understand that our democracy is being taken away from us. And we only have about a year, you know, to be clear about this. You know, you're doing a great job [Piers Morgan], and a lot of other people are doing a good job to tell people what is actually happening in this country. But make no mistake, we have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy, and democracy completely leaves us. And we're looking at the election in 2026, and Donald Trump knows that in a free and fair election he will lose the House. The House will flip, and will come into democratic hands. There will be committee chairs that'll be able to hold hearings, and this is the last thing he wants.

So, you know, these ICE agents, and the National Guard, and now he's called the military in from all over the world to talk to them, so don't be surprised when polling booths are surrounded by American military in the guise of making sure that the elections are fair.

-- Robert Reiner

BREAKING #news - Trump revels in Rob Reiner tragedy



Transcript

In a move that is disgusting even by
Trump standards, he took to Truth Social
this morning to revel in the tragic
death of Rob Reiner and his wife.
Writing, quote, "A very sad thing
happened last night in Hollywood. Rob
Reiner, a tortured and struggling but
once very talented movie director and
comedy star, has passed away together
with his wife Michelle, reportedly due
to the anger he caused others through
his massive, unyielding, and incurable
affliction with a mind crippling disease
known as Trump derangement syndrome,
sometimes referred to as TDS. He was
known to have driven people crazy by his
raging obsession of President Donald J.
Trump, with his obvious paranoia
reaching new heights as the Trump
administration surpassed all goals and
expectations of greatness. And with the
golden age of America upon us, perhaps
like never before, may Rob and Michelle
rest in peace.

Now, I don't think I have
to sit here and explain how suggesting
that Rob Reiner and his wife were killed
because they weren't sufficiently loyal
to Trump is insane, deluded, and
depraved. I don't think I have to sit
here and explain how making someone
else's death about you means you are
broken beyond repair. And I don't think
I have to sit here and explain how
reacting this way in the wake of
someone's death is legitimately sick.

And don't take it from me. Just look at
some of the reactions from his own
followers on True Social.

Terrible post
and I am a big Trump supporter. Take it
down. I respect you so much, but this
was heartless and uncalled for. You
could have said RIP. Love you, Mr.
President, but none of the other stuff
was needed. It's very sad we are living
the world we're living in now. Come on,
Mr. President. Not appropriate thing to
write. Please take that down. It's
beneath you. But the reality is that
it's not beneath him. The reality is
that it is exactly par for the course.
This is who Trump is and who he's always
been. He is a one-trick pony who can
only attack people because he is a car
crash that people can't look away from
and he's benefited from that so much in
the past. He is an egomaniacal
narcissist who think that the world
revolves around him. He doesn't have a
decent bone in his body and it's telling
that the more people who see him, the
less they like him. He's got full
control of government and has only
managed to watch his own approval rating
plummet to the lowest point of any
president in modern American history.
That is not an accident. It's because
people are learning who Trump is. What's
telling to is the egregious double
standard at play between how the right
and left treat death in this country. In
the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk
shooting, the State Department literally
announced it would not allow people into
this country who' quote made light of
Charlie Kirk's death. Trump vowed to
monitor political speech, revoke visas,
and designate far-left groups like
Antifa as domestic terrorists in
response to the attack, despite the fact
that Antifa had nothing to do with it.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
announced an investigation into the
reactions of members of the US Armed
Forces, as well as subsequent firings
and dismissals of those found to have
made comments about Kirk. J. D. Vance
called for people heard to have made
remarks deemed uncivil to Kirk to be
reported to their employers for
termination. Trump announced that any
network that criticized him too harshly
could be subject to a revocation of
their broadcast license. And that was in
light of the fact that virtually every
high-profile left-wing commentator,
politician, and personality immediately
lamented his death. In fact, there was a
viral mashup created in the wake of the
Kirk killing that showed left-wing
figures immediately condemning the
violence. Obama wrote, "We don't yet
know what motivated the person who shot
and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind
of despicable violence has no place in
our democracy. Michelle and I will be
praying for Charlie's family tonight,
especially his wife Erica and their two
young children." Joe Biden wrote, "There
is no place in our country for this kind
of violence. It must end now. Jill and I
are praying for Charlie Kirk's family
and loved ones." Mie Hassan wrote,
"Horrific news out of Utah. I hope Kirk
and anyone else affected are okay.
Political violence and gun violence is
never acceptable, excusable, or
justifiable." Jenuger, what happened to
Charlie Kirk is one of the worst things
that has happened in American politics.
My heart goes out to his family.
whoever did this. Not only is it deeply
tragic by itself, but we are now all in
danger. Violence is always wrong and
it's intellectual surrender. Bernie
Sanders wrote, "Political violence has
no place in this country. We must
condemn this horrifying attack." Zoron
Mandani, I'm horrified by the shooting
of Charlie Kirk at a college event in
Utah. Political violence has no place in
our country. Gavin Newsome. The attack
on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, violent,
reprehensible. In the United States of
America, we must reject political
violence in every form. Even I'm on
there. The Charlie Kirk shooting is
beyond horrific. Legitimately disgusted
at the broken state of this country. And
most importantly, here's Rob Reiner's
reaction to the killing.

Q. When you first
heard about the murder of Charlie Kirk,
what was your immediate gut reaction to
it?

A. Well, horror.
Absolute horror. And I
unfortunately
saw the video of it, and it's beyond belief what
happened to him. And that should never
happen to anybody. I don't care what
your political beliefs are. That's not
acceptable. That's not a solution
to solving problems. And I felt
like what his wife said at the
service, at the memorial they had, was
exactly right.

You know I'm Jewish, but I believe
in the teachings of Jesus, and I believe
in doing unto others, and I believe in
forgiveness. And what she said to me was
beautiful and she forgave
his assassin. And I think that
that is admirable.

In other words, even Rob Reiner himself
showed the grace that the leader of the
Republican party, the president of the
United States of America is apparently
incapable of showing in light of his own
death. And yet, not a single person on
the right who clutched their pearls over
the left's remorseful reaction to the
Kirk shooting will utter a single word
against Trump because it's not about any
semblance of principles. It is about
wanting to feel like victims always. And
so, even when your god king is doing the
exact thing that just 5 minutes ago used
to be a red line for you, it'll come and
go like a fart in a hurricane because
the manufactured outrage only works one
way. And that's a recurring theme on the
right. Republicans clutch their pearls
about states rights only until they give
up the game and prove it was never about
states rights. They clutch their pearls
about fiscal responsibility only until
they blow up the debt far more than any
Democrat ever has. They clutch their
pearls about family values only until
they rally behind a serial sexual
predator as their party's leader. They
rail about classified emails only until
their side invites a liberal reporter
onto an unsecured signal chat to discuss
war plans. They rail against a Democrat
president talking to an attorney
general. only until Trump begins DMing
Pam his little edicts on social media.
The list goes on and on and on. The
right offers a masterclass in pretending
to have red lines, in pretending to have
principles only to show conspicuous
silence the very moment they themselves
cross that red line. It should tell you
that it's not about principles. It is
about making show of pretending to be
mad so they can feel like victims. The
poor GOP in full control of government
and yet somehow completely helpless. So,
I'll say what the leader of the
Republican party is apparently incapable
of saying. Violence is always wrong. It
is never the answer. It is tragic no
matter the victim's political views or
affiliations. It makes all of us less
safe and only creates an environment
where hatred and those who espouse it
can flourish and fester. And people who
thrive off of that hatred can rise. If
you are wondering why Trump is so intent
on creating it, that's why. because
everything is an opportunity to help
himself, no matter whose body he has to
climb over to get there.
Before you go, if you enjoyed this
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[admin]

What Rob Reiner Told Me About Trump and His Hope for the Future. “I’m trying to push back as best I can,” the director said in an interview three months before he was murdered. “And hopefully we can preserve democracy.”
by Matt Wilstein
Daily Beast
Published Dec. 15 2025 1:36PM EST
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-rob- ... he-future/

Rob Reiner Feared Trump Was Turning America Into Nazi Germany | The Last Laugh Clip
The Daily Beast‘s Obsessed and The Daily Beast
Dec 15, 2025

Rob Reiner's last interview with The Last Laugh saw the legendary director share how he learned to become so outspoken in his political beliefs, the horrifying direction that America is heading towards under Trump, and the importance of preserving democracy in these dark times. Plus, he discusses with Matt Wilstein about whether he thoght his films would have such a lasting impact and what it is about films like ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ that make them so great.

Transcript

I read the New York Times, the
headlines. I can't read too much past
some of the headlines because
it's really disturbing. I mean, you
know, for those of us, you know, my
wife, her mother was in Aushwitz, and
she lost her entire family there. She
was the only survivor. My uncle Charlie
was part of D-Day, and fought in 11 major
battles. My second father is Norman Leer, you know, who
is another big figure in my
life. He flew 52 bombing missions over
Nazi Germany, and millions and millions
of people died so that we wouldn't have
what we see happening now in America.
And that is a very disturbing thing. And
make no mistake, this is where we are
right now. And we have to become aware
of it. And what do we do about that?
Well, we have to do whatever we can. And
so I'm trying to push back as best I can
in ways that I know how. And
hopefully we can preserve democracy,
because it's a 250-year experiment that
has in fits and starts improved itself.
I mean, there was a time when women
couldn't vote, and now they can. There was a
time where black people couldn't vote, and
now they can. We
had a Black president. We've been
flawed, incredibly flawed, but we've
moved forward. We continue. This is the
first time I'm seeing this thing that is
so difficult to hold on to, that is
so ephemeral, being destroyed in less
than a year. And they say all the institutions
are holding. Well the institutions
only hold if people agree that the rule
of law is important, that the
Constitution is important. If we don't
believe that, then you can do
whatever you want. And that's what's
happening now.

So, I'm hoping we'll
survive this. And if we do, it's going
to take a long time to rebuild the
shining city on the hill, the beacon to
the rest of the world. You go outside
of our country, and I've been out
in the UK and other places, they don't
know what the hell's happening in
America. They don't understand what's
happening. This used to be the place
that welcomed immigrants, that
welcomed people, and that was our
strength. The diversity was our strength.
And now people are being thrown
out of the country without due process.
It's nightmarish what's happening in
America, and hopefully people will be
able to see that. Unfortunately, voters,
they only feel when it hits them
personally in the pocketbook. But when
they also feel their rights being taken away, it may start
to change things. But hopefully it's
not too late. It's as bad as anything could be in
this country at this point. The hope was
if we could have one country that allows
people from all ethnicities,
colors, religions, sexual preferences,
all living in one place, it would prove
that the world can be One, that John
Lennon talks about in Imagine. It could
prove that this was the place we were
going to do it. And right now it
isn't happening. So, let's see.

Let's used to be very outspoken was Twitter,
which is now of course called X. Um I
believe you deleted your account after
the election, you got off of Twitter like
like a lot of people did. Was it just the
re-election of Trump that did that, or
was there something that made
you think I have to stop doing this?

No, it wasn't that. It was when
Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into
X, and it became a platform for this
kind of authoritarian
point of view. And at one point I
tried to get back on. You know, I had
like nearly 2-1/2 million followers.
I tried to get back on, but I couldn't
couldn't use my name, because they had
taken it. So I call myself the actual
Rob, something like that.

And so from two and a half million followers, I
went to like 100.

Yeah. 98. But there's other ways to do this. And I did notice every time you
would post something political, you'd
have about a hundred trolls
responding calling you meathead.
Which is something that stuck to you for
a long time.

I was happy when they
called me that. I mean it went from
there to Libtard and then from Libtard it
went to Pedophile. So it can get a lot
worse.

So you mentioned Norman Lear,
the creator of All in the Family, who
you've talked about as a mentor. I think
he really pioneered this certain way of
using both comedy and entertainment, but
also his celebrity to promote a
political message. What did you learn
from him about being outspoken, and
saying what's on your mind, not being
afraid to to speak out?

The very thing you're saying, which is
you can use your fame, or you celebrity, whatever ,f
you have something you want to get
across, a policy issue that you want to
highlight ,or you want to try
to see if you can push forward, you can
marry those things, but you have to ...

Listen I'm going to be called these
things no matter what, but there was
never a time that I went on to talk
about either early childhood, or
marriage equality, or environment, that I
couldn't answer fifth, sixth,
seventh tier questions, cuz I'm going to
be tarnished as a celebrity.
I can go on with Tucker
Carlson. I can go on with Laura Ingraham.
They can't stump me. Because I've
worked in government. For seven years I
was up in Sacramento running a
Commission. I know how policy works. I
know the intersection between policy,
politics, and programs that
push a policy forward. You
can't ask me a question that I'm not
going to have the answer to. So, you can
call me whatever you want, but I'm going
to know what I I'm talking about.

And listen, I had a good conversation the other day
with Jane Fonda, and Jane, you know,
has a certain reputation, too. and
she said something that hit me, which is during the '50s
there was McCarthyism,
and there was a contingency in Hollywood
that pushed back on it, because Hollywood
blacklisted people, people
and couldn't get jobs, and there were
people that formed a Commission, a
group, to push back on it. Her father Henry
Fonda was part of that. And she said
there has to be something where we can
galvanize people who are famous because
you get attention. They can criticize
you but you get attention.

Look at Donald Trump. He's got all the attention
in the world, and doesn't know what the
hell he's talking about. But you
can get attention, and maybe there's
a way that we can harness that to start
pushing back on autocracy and
fascism. And we haven't figured that out
yet, but hopefully we can.

So, several years ago, I had the great
honor of meeting you and your father,
Carl Reiner, together, at the Chinipped
theater ceremony. And
I remember you joking that you
should have dipped your bald heads in
the cement, but I guess they didn't
let you do that. But I think I told
you this at the time, but I wanted to
tell you again, that you each made a
movie that is not only among my personal
favorites, you know, but is
very personally important to me. My
wife and I, our very first date, we
watched The Jerk, which is your
father's movie. And then long before
that, the first movie that I ever saw in
a movie theater when I was three years
old was The Princess Bride, which
had a huge impact on me even as a
three-year-old, and continued
to be one of my favorites to this day.
So talking about that movie, I mean,
it's still such a perfect film to me.
Did you expect it to endure like it did,
like Spinal Tap, to have as many
quotable lines and pieces of the culture
in it?

You never know when you make a
film. You don't know what the people
what's going to stay and what's not
going to stay. You know, you know, I was
in All in the Family. There are young
people that never heard of this show.
They don't even know what it is. And
this is the the biggest show that was
ever on television for 5 years straight.
And people 40 to 45 million people
watched it every week. And they had to
watch it when it was on because there
was no DVR, there was no uh tapes or
anything like that. So pe you know you
never know what's going to last and
things will last for a while and then
even those things go away you know so
you have to do something that you like
that you're you know you enjoy doing and
you like the process and you whatever
happens to it happens to it but 3 years
old I'm curious weren't you scared by
the rodents of unusual
terrified yeah traumatized it was that
that was that was tough but I still I
stuck through it and I I I stayed um but
That was that was that was a challenging
one I think for my parents as well. Um
on that film on Princess Bride, you
know, it was scripted. It was based on a
the the book and everything. Um but I
imagine there were things that you found
while you were shooting. Is there
anything that comes to mind of a moment
of comedy that you found on the set
while you were while you were shooting
it maybe that was unexpected in some
way?
Well, I mean, you know, the performances
to me is what made it great. I mean,
Billy Crystal, the what I love about
Billy is, well, first of all, he's
really funny. You know, he plays Miracle
Max, but he also he gives you some
freebies, what we call what you're not
expecting. I mean, in the scene where
he's trying to, you know, bring Wesley
back to life and he says he's mostly
dead, you know. He says, uh, oh, and he
says, I he said he said true love. He
says, "No, no, no." He said, "To blave."
He said, "To blave," which is, you know,
to bluff. And oh, he says, but he says,
"True love is the most important is the
best thing in the world." And then he
says, "Uh, aside of a be an MLT, a
mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich,
when the mutton is nice and lean, that's
all improvised." He comes up with this.
That got me. That got me. That I I
That's not in the script. And he also
says at the end, have fun storing the
castle. But he says, "Don't don't go in
for swimming at least an hour, a good
hour." Those are all those are all
Billy. He he improvised a lot of stuff
in there and those all got me.
One other one that I wanted to touch on
was When Harry Met Sally, which I feel
like is is also just one of my favorites
and and such a such an iconic film. Um,
for me, I think what really makes it
transcend other romcoms is how it
includes both the male and female
perspective really in even um, measure
and that's really because of the way you
made it with Norah Efron, right?
Yes. I mean, it's an idea I had uh based
on the 10 years of uh single life that I
had after being married for 10 years and
making a complete and utter mess in my
dating life and getting in and out of
relationships, not knowing how I was
ever going to be with anybody. So, I
knew how I knew my experience, but you
know, from the female perspective, I I
happened to mentioned I was having lunch
with Nor. I happened to mention I was
thinking about this. She, oh, that's an
interesting idea. Maybe I would, you
know, get involved. So when we started
working on it, I knew I needed a woman's
point of view and I had her point of
view and she brought her experience to
the table and it was really a, you know,
she's Meg Ryan, an extension of Meg Ryan
and uh I'm an extension of uh Billy
Crystal. I mean, so it's really about
the two of us, our experiences as men
and women, and we've kind of pushed that
through the ...

The legendary comedian, actor, and director confessed to me during an episode of The Last Laugh podcast in September that he was having trouble reading “past the headlines” of the news because he found everything going on in the second Trump administration so “disturbing.”

[x]
Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner arrive at the premiere of "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues" at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on September 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Kevin Winter/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty

Reiner, 78, and his wife Michele, 68, were murdered at their Los Angeles home on Sunday. Police currently have the couple’s son Nick Reiner, 32, in custody. Rob and Nick, who collaborated on a 2015 film about Nick’s addiction struggles, were reportedly spotted having a heated argument at Conan O’Brien’s annual Christmas party the night before.

The true nature of their intense conflict remains a private matter, but that did not stop President Trump from declaring in a particularly unhinged social media post on Monday that Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

Reiner was indeed an outspoken critic of Trump, dating back to his first successful run for president in 2016. The spring after Trump took office, Reiner and I chatted outside the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he and his father, comedy icon Carl Reiner, had just put their hand and footprints in the cement next to each other.

“This is a tragedy of epic proportions, what we have going on in our country right now,” Reiner said at the time. “It’s a real test to our democracy, whether we can withstand this kind of disruption. To have a president who is so ignorant, so egotistical, and a pathological liar—and he definitely has some kind of mental challenges, I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

By the time we spoke again on the podcast more than eight years later, Trump was back in office for his second term, and Reiner was even more fearful about the prospect of America becoming something more akin to the fascism his Jewish forebears had escaped.

[x]
Honorees Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner and producer Norman Lear attend the Carl and Rob Reiner Hand and Footprint Ceremony during the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival on April 7, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM

Reiner shared with me that his wife Michele’s mother had been imprisoned in Auschwitz and “lost her entire family there, she was the only survivor.”

Describing All in the Family creator Norman Lear, who died at 101 two years ago, as his “second father,” Reiner added, “He flew 52 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, and millions and millions of people died so that we wouldn’t have what we see happening now in America... And make no mistake, this is where we are right now, and we have to become aware of it.”

[x]
A photo illustration of Rob Reiner in This Is Spinal Tap and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Spinal Tap Productions/Castle Rock Entertainment

“And what do we do about that? Well, we have to do whatever we can,” Reiner continued. “And so I’m trying to push back as best I can in ways that I know how, and hopefully we can preserve democracy because it’s a 250-year experiment that has, in fits and starts, improved itself.”

“So I’m hoping we’ll survive this,” he added. “And if we do, it’s going to take a long time to rebuild the shining city on the hill, the beacon to the rest of the world. This used to be the place that welcomed immigrants. Diversity was our strength. And now people are being thrown out of the country without due process. It’s nightmarish what’s happening in America. And, hopefully, people will be able to see that. It’s as bad as anything could be in this country at this point.”

But as dark as he could get about the state of the country, Reiner never lost the hopeful streak that made him believe things could get better again.

Toward the end of what would be our last talk, Reiner recalled a conversation he had with fellow celebrity activist Jane Fonda about galvanizing people in influential positions to speak out against the Trump regime.

“Maybe there’s a way that we can harness that to start pushing back on autocracy and fascism,” Reiner said, optimistically. “We haven’t figured that out yet, but hopefully we can.”

Rob Reiner Takes on Trump, Elon and the Return of ‘Spinal Tap’ | The Last Laugh
The Daily Beast and The Daily Beast‘s Obsessed
Premiered Sep 19, 2025 The Last Laugh

Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Rob Reiner has directed some of the most beloved and acclaimed films in Hollywood history. But he had never directed a sequel until ‘Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues.’ In this episode, Reiner breaks down why he decided to reunite with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer for one last mockumentary 41 years after they invented the genre with ‘This Is Spinal Tap.’ He talks about how the comedy of the film has evolved now that they are in their 70s and 80s, and the secret to playing the straight man opposite someone as effortlessly funny as Guest. Reiner also gets into the state of America under Trump 2.0, how Elon Musk drove him away from Twitter, and what he learned about being a politically outspoken celebrity from Norman Lear and Jane Fonda. Finally, he reflects on his relationship with his late father Carl Reiner, recalls the first time he met Mel Brooks, and considers the enduring legacy of classic films like ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘When Harry Met Sally.’

[admin]

Jaguar Wright's Shocking Claims About Erika Kirk
Gossip Zip
Oct 18, 2025

The world watched in stunned disbelief as news broke of Charlie Kirk’s sudden and violent end. A prominent, often polarizing voice was silenced in a brutal, public fashion, but the story that emerged was far from simple. As the official narrative took shape, a dark undercurrent of suspicion began to swell, a feeling that what we were being told was a carefully constructed facade. This isn't just about a tragic loss; it's about a tangled web of deceit, powerful figures operating in the shadows, and an alleged cover-up that seems to stretch into the highest echelons of power. The story of a lone gunman has crumbled, replaced by a storm of accusations and shocking revelations that paint a far more sinister picture.




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Jaguar Wright EXPOSES Charlie Kirk’s Widow — What Happens Next Will SHOCK You!
Gossipspills
Dec 13, 2025

[admin]

HOLY SH*T! Trump ATTACKS MAGA REVOLTING Over Reiner Post!
Jack Cocchiarella
Dec 15, 2025
Jack Cocchiarella Show

Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to Donald Trump's oval office meltdown.



Transcript

MAGA is revoling against Donald Trump
and he only has himself to blame. He has
crippled our economy. He is a pedto
protector and a pedto himself. And now
his disgusting post attacking Rob Reiner
and his wife who had their lives stolen
from them last night has MAGA finally
waking up and turning on Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump he is attacking them
right back. It is an allout civil war
and Donald Trump just panicked, melted
down, and was screaming about it in the
Oval Office when pressed by a reporter.
Today, we're going to get into it all,
but before we do, if I could quickly ask
you to leave a like on this video, and
if you haven't already and you enjoy our
channel and our work and calling out
Donald Trump to hit that subscribe
button because it goes a long way. Now,
before we get into Donald Trump
attacking his own party as they turn on
him, doubling down amid this MAGA civil
war, I want to start where Donald Trump
did yelling and lying about drugs,
trying to excuse the other crimes that
have him in trouble with his party.
And we don't put up with it. I have to
say the uh drugs coming in by sea are
down 94%.
and we're trying to figure out who the
other 6% are, but they're down 94% and
we're going to start hitting them on
land, which is a lot easier to do,
frankly.
But, uh, these are a direct military
threat to the United States of America.
They're trying to drug out our country.
And you can look throughout history.
Look at China. When they were loaded up
with drugs, they were suffering greatly.
and others were able to take them over
and other countries also. They're trying
to drug out our country and we're we're
reversing it rapidly actually. But with
the help of our great service members,
we've stopped the invasion in its tracks
and we're dismantling the cartels very
rapidly
and uh they are being declared
enemies of the United States of America.
They have been so declared, legally
declared. More than 25,000 warriors have
served in this historic operation. It is
indeed an incredible and historic
operation.
I wanted to start with that clip because
I want to make it clear that a press
conference that went so off the rails
that Donald Trump was attacking his own
party, was attacking Republicans,
calling him out, was supposed to be
about preventing the flow of drugs into
America. something that Donald Trump was
happy to pardon the excriminal president
of Honduras for. Now, that country
trying to bring back and try that
criminal in their own nation. Mind you,
Donald Trump is is fine when it's a
pardon that gets him a little cash on
the side, right? But when it's innocent
fishermen in international waters, he's
going to blow them up and commit murder.
an issue that Donald Trump's own party
is going to war with him over because of
course they should. It would be idiotic
not to. It would be a dereliction of
duty not to call out Donald Trump, the
man who said that he would be anti-war
for trying to start one for no purpose
at all and for killing innocent people
on international waters. That is what
Donald Trump attempted to cover up today
in this press conference, touting
military leaders around him, trying to
excuse his and Pete Hegath's illegal
actions, but it just didn't work because
as always, Donald Trump is going off the
rails. So, he had decided that he would
not only attack Republicans, but of
course, Democrats as well yelling about
affordability and calling it a scam.
And they don't mention the border
anymore. Nobody talks about the border.
They talk about affordability and we're
the ones that are bringing the prices
down. We were given the worst inflation
in our country's history and we're
bringing the prices down. Uh but the
affordability is on the Democrats
because they have made it unaffordable
to be in this country. But we're
bringing those prices down and they're
coming down quickly. Uh energy is coming
way down and if you look uh gasoline
prices are hitting in many locations
$1.99
a gallon. Nobody thought they'd see that
there.
Again, this was supposed to be about
Donald Trump talking about preventing
drugs from coming into America. These
are issues that he doesn't care about. I
want to make this incredibly clear
before we get into what he had to say
once again about Rob Reiner and his and
his wife who had their lives stolen from
them and the Republicans who Donald
Trump is furious with for calling him
out. Donald Trump does not care about
drugs coming into the United States. If
he did, he wouldn't spend this press
conference yelling about an actor and a
director and an artist and an activist
who was murdered in his home and
screaming lies about affordability. If
Donald Trump actually cared about drugs
that are ending and ruining lives in
this country, he would be able to focus
for half a second. But he is unable to
because the Trump derangement syndrome
he always talks about is Donald Trump's
by himself. His own narcissism, his own
selfobsession, his own victim complex is
the Trump derangement syndrome. That is
all. And Republicans are starting to see
it. It is why they are calling him out.
And this article that we are going to
take a look at is what has led Donald
Trump to freak out in the Oval Office.
MAGA turns on Trump over deranged Rob
Reiner post. Even some of Donald Trump's
most devoted followers recoiled at his
suggestion that Hollywood director Rob
Reiner was killed because of his own
Trump derangement syndrome. A day after
Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michelle
Reiner, 68, were found murdered at their
Los Angeles home on Sunday, Trump
attacked the filmmaker in a truth social
post, portraying him as a struggling man
with obvious paranoia, who had brought
his death upon himself due to his raging
obsession with the president.
A number of Republicans have denounced
your statement on True Social after the
murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by
that post?
Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He
was a deranged person as far as Trump is
concerned. He said uh he liked he knew
it was false. In fact, it's the exact
opposite that I was uh a friend of
Russia controlled by Russia. You know,
it was the Russia hooks. He was one of
the people behind it. I think he hurt
himself in career-wise. He became like a
deranged person. Trump derangement
syndrome. So, I was not a fan of Rob
Reiner at all in any way, shape, or
form. I thought he was very bad for our
country. Yeah. Marjorie Taylor Green,
Piers Morgan, Don Bacon, all those
idiotic MAGA accounts you see on Twitter
turned on Donald Trump, called him out
and his response was to double down. Was
to double down. When pressed by a
reporter giving Donald Trump a very
clear out, he doubled down. Said, "Well,
I didn't like the guy, and that's all it
takes." If Donald Trump doesn't like
someone, he views them as subhuman. He
views them as a punching bag, as a
political tool. This is not a man who
cares about political violence. This is
not a man who cares about right and
wrong. This is not a man who cares about
the dignity of human life. He cares
about himself. The Trump derangement
syndrome is the derangement that Trump
has in his bone brain to think that this
is all about him, that we are all only
obsessed with him. We are not. We be
happy for him to [ __ ] off and go away
and to leave us alone. It is what we are
pining for. It is what we have needed
for so long. So long in fact that Joe
Biden's presidency felt consumed with
trying to ignore Donald Trump. So maybe,
just maybe, we could all have a moment
of peace. But unfortunately, that was a
mistake. It was a mistake to pretend
like this guy didn't exist. It was a
mistake to pretend like we couldn't just
move on. It was a mistake to not realize
that Donald Trump was a symptom, not the
whole sickness, and that fascism in its
entirety has to be beaten down. Those
who excuse this in the corporate media,
those who push it
in the business community looking for a
bigger handout from a fascist
that they can impress, a fascist they
can gain favor with
institutions. so excited to bend the
knee
and the racist,
bigoted,
xenophobic,
misogynistic
dredges of society waiting for someone
to tap into their their worst and most
angry impulses. That is what Donald
Trump has ignited and that is what has
to be stamped out. It's not just about
the orange fat [ __ ] in the White House.
It's about what he represents, who he
serves. It is an oligarchy. It is an
angry minority of people who do not
understand this country. And it has to
be rooted out. It cannot be ignored for
us to have peace. It is not to ignore
these people, but to get rid of their
ability to have power in our society and
to hurt us all. That is what Donald
Trump does. And I know it's tough on a
day like today to not just tune him out,
but we have to beat them.
We have to beat them. And that includes
holding them accountable when they break
the law, which is what Rachel Matto and
Jen Saki were talking about right here.
And so what is it? Apparently, it's a
regime change war so we can try to take
their oil. Well, that'll work out great.
That's always worked out great for us in
the past. I I mean, what what what's
going on here? And who's driving this?
Trump doesn't seem to have any idea
what's going on here or why. No, which
is which is an evergreen statement about
Trump and national security in general.
It seems I I keep thinking and again
it's important to we don't totally know
what's going on here but about his
obsession over the course of time with
taking oil from other countries which he
has talked about for so many years and I
am betting his oil baron friends are in
his mind but we will learn more over the
coming days. I mean, this is all kind of
to your point. I mean, the these
extraditional strikes, the seizure of
this oil tanker, it's so many things
going on that feels over the legal line
and feels like it's setting incredibly
dangerous precedents as you look at the
totality of it. I mean, what concerns
you most about what you're seeing and
really where this goes because this is a
very slippery slope. They could they I
think they feel justified to to seize
more oil tankers. We'll see what
happens.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's basically
three things going on here. I think one
is that Trump wants to demonstrate that
he is unconstrained by law, politics, or
public opinion. Like, he wants to the
reason there's no king's protests
against Trump is not just because he
calls himself a king and, you know,
looks the part, but because he is trying
to create a an illegal or or sort of um
non-legal regime around himself in which
he is unconstrained by any of the things
that legally constrain an American
president. So that's that's dangerous.
That's part of what this is. The other
thing that's really bad about this is it
looks like we might get a war. And it
really looks like a regime change war to
try to take their oil, which really is
something we know a lot about in this
country and is supposedly part of the
reason that Trump arose in Republican
politics because he was against those
sorts of things. Like that's supposedly
the whole theory of the case for why JD
Vance exists, right, as a political
figure. But the last thing I think is
the weirdest thing to worry about, which
is that Trump really doesn't seem to
have any idea why he's going to war in
Venezuela, nor does he seem to be in
charge of any of the decisions that are
leading us to this war. And so we also
have to worry about who's actually
running the government right now and who
is actually driving us toward this
regime change war that the president
doesn't seem to be at the helm of. We
don't know who is and we don't know why.
And that sort of careening feeling that
you're having right now is the most
worrying part of all of this to me.
There needs to be accountability. We
cannot move on. And the same way that
Charlie Kirk's death did not excuse the
way he lived his life and why I will
continue to call out him and his
grifting wife.
Loss does not excuse what you did in
power. When we beat MAGA,
it will not be time to move on.
We must hold them accountable. We're
going to talk about that on this show.
If you want to support that, as always,
you can hit that subscribe button, leave
a like on this video. If you stuck
around to the end, drop a blue heart in
the comments. Keep on fighting, y'all.
Don't let them silence you. And until
next time, I'll see you

[admin]

Senate Republicans reject Trump’s plea for gerrymandered maps
By: Tom Davies and Casey Smith
December 11, 2025 4:42 pm
https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/202 ... ered-maps/

Sen. Mike Gaskill, R-Pendleton, argues in support of a redistricting bill in the Senate Chamber on Dec. 11, 2025. (Photo by Casey Smith/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

The Republican-dominated Indiana Senate spurned months of demands from President Donald Trump as it voted 31-19 on Thursday to reject a redrawing of the state’s congressional maps.

The final outcome remained uncertain until 21 Republicans joined all 10 Democratic senators in blocking the redistricting plan. The proposal didn’t even win support from a majority of the 40 Republican senators.

With that tally, Indiana became the first Republican-led state Legislature to vote down Trump’s wish to squeeze out more GOP-friendly congressional seats in hopes of improving the party’s chances of keeping its slim U.S. House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.

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Sen. Greg Goode, R-Terre Haute, speaks during the Senate redistricting debate on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025.(Photo by Casey Smith/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Thursday’s Senate outcome came even with Trump, Gov. Mike Braun and other redistricting supporters continuing to cajole — and politically threaten — senators who opposed the move.

“I am very disappointed that a small group of misguided State Senators have partnered with Democrats to reject this opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps and to reject the leadership of President Trump,” Braun said in a statement following the vote. “Ultimately, decisions like this carry political consequences. I will be working with the President to challenge these people who do not represent the best interests of Hoosiers.”

The Indiana House last week approved the new maps crafted by the National Republican Redistricting Trust to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation. It did so by carving up the two districts currently held by Democratic Reps. André Carson in Indianapolis and Frank Mrvan in the area along Lake Michigan near Chicago.

But the Senate’s Republican leader, President Pro Tem Rodric Bray, had said repeatedly that too few GOP senators supported the mid-decade redistricting for it to pass.

[x]
Sen. Mike Gaskill, R-Pendleton, argues in support of a redistricting bill in the Senate Chamber on Dec. 11, 2025. (Photo by Casey Smith/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

The Republican-dominated Indiana Senate spurned months of demands from President Donald Trump as it voted 31-19 on Thursday to reject a redrawing of the state’s congressional maps.

The final outcome remained uncertain until 21 Republicans joined all 10 Democratic senators in blocking the redistricting plan. The proposal didn’t even win support from a majority of the 40 Republican senators.

With that tally, Indiana became the first Republican-led state Legislature to vote down Trump’s wish to squeeze out more GOP-friendly congressional seats in hopes of improving the party’s chances of keeping its slim U.S. House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.

[x]
Sen. Greg Goode, R-Terre Haute, speaks during the Senate redistricting debate on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025.(Photo by Casey Smith/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Thursday’s Senate outcome came even with Trump, Gov. Mike Braun and other redistricting supporters continuing to cajole — and politically threaten — senators who opposed the move.

“I am very disappointed that a small group of misguided State Senators have partnered with Democrats to reject this opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps and to reject the leadership of President Trump,” Braun said in a statement following the vote. “Ultimately, decisions like this carry political consequences. I will be working with the President to challenge these people who do not represent the best interests of Hoosiers.”

The Indiana House last week approved the new maps crafted by the National Republican Redistricting Trust to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation. It did so by carving up the two districts currently held by Democratic Reps. André Carson in Indianapolis and Frank Mrvan in the area along Lake Michigan near Chicago.

But the Senate’s Republican leader, President Pro Tem Rodric Bray, had said repeatedly that too few GOP senators supported the mid-decade redistricting for it to pass.

“This is an extremely important issue that we’ve taken very seriously,” Bray told reporters after the bill’s defeat.

Bray downplayed the prospect of retribution from the White House after Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly criticized him and other Republican senators.

“It’s their prerogative to have opinions about what we’re doing here. So, that’s fair,” he said.

Asked whether he was concerned about possible loss of federal funding or other consequences, Bray appeared unmoved.

“I’ve had lots of conversations with folks in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Indiana will continue to function.”

A bill needs 26 votes for passage or defeat. Because a constitutional majority — 25 votes or more — voted against the measure, it can’t be taken up by state lawmakers again until the 2027 session.

Trump was calling individual senators this week seeking support and took to social media Wednesday night to seethe over Bray and other Indiana Republicans who weren’t following his demands.

Senator says ‘we can’t be bullied’

A crowd of about 100 protesters outside the Senate chamber echoed throughout the three-hour debate, chanting, “Fair maps now!” and “Vote no!” and “Cheaters!” and “Liars!” and “Just vote no!”

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Protesters celebrate outside the Senate chamber when a redistricting bill is defeated on Dec. 11, 2025. (Photo by Tom Davies/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Brooke Isaac of Columbus and other protesters cheered the outcome, saying she was “very surprised and so very thankful.”

Isaac said she believed Trump was trying to use Indiana as a “pawn” to acquire power.

“I’m just really relieved that the Republicans and our government have decided to show integrity and to stand up for what the people in our state care about,” Isaac said.

Sen. Sue Glick, R-LaGrange, was among the senators voting against the new maps and said she believed the pressure and threats from Washington backfired.

“You have to know Hoosiers, we can’t be bullied,” Glick said. “We don’t want that. And the instant reaction is we dig in our heels and say, why?”

Indiana House Republicans pushed the proposed maps through that chamber last week by a 57-41 margin, with 12 GOP members joining Democrats in voting “no.”

Several Republican senators against the redistricting plan cited what they described as overwhelming public opposition. Others said they didn’t believe it was proper to overhaul the Republican-drawn maps approved in 2021 for such blatant political purposes, with some objecting to the overt gerrymandering of Indianapolis among four districts spanning as far away as the Ohio River.

Trump started the national redistricting fight by pushing Texas Republicans to redraw its congressional map this summer, followed by Republican redistricting moves in Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina. An attempt by Kansas Republicans for a special session on redistricting stalled this fall.

Democrats responded with their own redistricting in California and possible moves in Illinois and Virginia.

Bill sponsor called for Republicans to ‘fight’

Redistricting bill sponsor Sen. Mike Gaskill, R-Pendleton, used all of his 30-minute speaking time to argue in support of it after all 10 Democratic senators and three Republicans spoke in opposition.

“They want you to play by a different set of rules,” Gaskill said, referring to Democrats.

The 21 Senate Republicans who voted no are:

Sen. Eric Bassler
Sen. Vaneta Becker
Sen. Mike Bohecek
Sen. Rodric Bray
Sen. Brian Buchanan
Sen. Jim Buck
Sen. Ed Charbonneau
Sen. Brett Clark
Sen. Mike Crider
Sen. Spencer Deery
Sen. Dan Dernulc
Sen. Blake Doriot
Sen. Sue Glick
Sen. Greg Goode
Sen. Travis Holdman
Sen. Jean Leising
Sen. Ryan Mishler
Sen. Rick Niemeyer
Sen. Linda Rogers
Sen. Greg Walker
Sen. Kyle Walker

He called on his colleagues “to step up and do the right thing.”

“I want to see us on the Republican side fight as hard for our side as they do,” Gaskill said.

Sen. Greg Walker, R-Columbus — who has been outspoken against midcycle redistricting — called the bill “on its face, is unconstitutional.”

“I cannot, myself, support the bill for which there must be a legal injunction in order for it to be found constitutional,” he said.

Sen. Greg Goode, R-Terre Haute, had not announced a position before Thursday’s vote but told the chamber that “overwhelming feedback” from his constituents — “regardless of political leaning, or party affiliation” — influenced his decision. He ultimately voted no on the bill.

“I’ve done my very best to quietly and respectfully listen to the people I represent,” Goode said, “and I’m confident that my vote reflects the will of my constituents.”

At least a dozen legislators, many Senate Republicans — including Goode — have publicly disclosed being targeted in swatting attempts, bomb threats and more. The incidents have prompted an ongoing investigation now led by the Indiana State Police.

“Whether we realize it or not — whether we accept it or not — the forces that define these vitriolic political affairs in places outside of Indiana have gradually, and now very blatantly, infiltrated the political affairs in Indiana,” Goode said. “Misinformation, cruel social media posts, over-the-top pressure from within the Statehouse and outside. Threats of primaries. Threats of violence. Acts of violence. Friends, we’re better than this, are we not?”

Three Republicans — Sens. Liz Brown, Tyler Johnson and Chris Garten — all spoke in staunch support.

“The vote we are about to take is not just about lines on a map — it’s a vote of critical, epic proportion,” Garten said in his passionate remarks. “We’re not here to be neutral arbiters of decline. We’re here to be active agents of American greats.”

Tom Davies joins the Indiana Capital Chronicle with more than a decade of state government experience. He recently served as managing editor and senior Statehouse reporter for State Affairs Indiana after working in a variety of roles for The Associated Press, including as the supervisor of Indiana news coverage and as the lead state government and politics reporter. He has been president of both the Society of Professional Journalists’ Indiana Chapter and the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

MORE FROM AUTHOR

[admin]

Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions. In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said President Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and concluded that Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.
By Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent
New York Times
Dec. 16, 2025 Updated 2:36 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/p ... wiles.html

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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[x]
Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team. ...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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 on 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.

Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.

Ms. Wiles described her own reservations about certain policies in real time to Mr. Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, even as debates raged inside the administration. She said she urged Mr. Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from Jan. 6, 2021, which he did anyway. She unsuccessfully tried to get him to delay his major tariffs because of a “huge disagreement” among his advisers. And she said the administration needed to “look harder” at deportations to prevent mistakes.

But she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

[x]
Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.

While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.

Ms. Wiles, a low-key Florida political strategist who ran Mr. Trump’s successful comeback campaign last year, has been the president’s most important aide this term, credited with running a more disciplined operation than he had in his chaotic first term. He has embraced her so much that he referred to her during a rally last week as “Susie Trump.”

But the White House under Ms. Wiles is chaotic too, just in a different way. Unlike John F. Kelly, the president’s longest serving chief of staff in his first term, who saw his job as trying to prevent what he considered radical, unwise or even illegal actions, Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.

She attributes her ability to work for Mr. Trump to growing up with an alcoholic father, the sportscaster Pat Summerall. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” While Mr. Trump does not drink, she said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

[x]
Vice President JD Vance, left, Stephen Miller, second from the left, Elon Musk, second from the right, and Susie Wiles at the White House. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

The president’s fixation on payback against his enemies offers a case study. Ms. Wiles confided in Mr. Whipple in March that she had told Mr. Trump that his presidency was not supposed to be a retribution tour.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

Among the targets, she acknowledged, was Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who won a civil court verdict against Mr. Trump for business fraud with a penalty of nearly $500 million. “Well, that might be the one retribution,” Ms. Wiles said. Did she advise Mr. Trump to back off? “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money.” (An appeals court later threw out the penalty as excessive but left the verdict intact.)

As for James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump while leading an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ms. Wiles said, “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” She added: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

The Trump administration has brought indictments against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, but both were dismissed by a federal judge. The administration has vowed to keep trying, but two grand juries have since refused to re-indict Ms. James and another judge issued a ruling that will make it harder to pursue Mr. Comey.

Reached for comment on Monday evening, Ms. Wiles played down Mr. Trump’s personal motivations in the actions against his enemies. “It’s not that he thinks they wronged him, although they did,” she told The New York Times. “He thinks that they wronged, and they should not be able to do to somebody else what they did to him and the way that you could cure that, at least potentially, is to expose what was done.”

She added that she wanted to get that over with early in the term. “You don’t want it to get in the way of the real agenda,” she said. “And so, loosely, let’s get it all going within 90 days. Which we did. Now, the justice system works slowly and so even if it was initiated in 90 days, it could be a long time before it’s done.”

In the interviews published by Vanity Fair, Ms. Wiles faulted Ms. Bondi, one of her closest friends in the administration, for her early handling of the Epstein files, an issue that has been a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.

“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Ms. Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” Mr. Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself was “a conspiracy theorist,” she said.

Ms. Wiles said she has read the Epstein documents and acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s name is in them. “We know he’s in the file,” she said. “And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”

But neither, apparently, is Mr. Clinton. Asked about Mr. Trump’s claims going back years that Mr. Clinton had visited the Epstein island, Ms. Wiles said, “There is no evidence.” Asked if there was anything incriminating about Mr. Clinton in the files, as Mr. Trump has suggested, she said, “The president was wrong about that.”

She added that it was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s idea to go interview Mr. Epstein’s convicted associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison and that the president did not know that she would be transferred to a minimum-security prison camp. “The president was ticked,” she said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”

[x]
Mr. Musk, Karoline Leavitt and Ms. Wiles at the White House in March. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Ms. Wiles described frustration with Mr. Musk, the billionaire who early in the year was empowered to eviscerate federal agencies and fire employees en masse with almost no process. “He’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.” When he shared a post saying that Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions, their public sector workers did, Ms. Wiles said, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” Asked what she meant, she said, “he’s an avowed ketamine” user.

Mr. Musk has acknowledged trying ketamine “a few years ago,” but denied reports of more recent use. In the interview with The Times on Monday, Ms. Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about his drug use. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But Mr. Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.

Mr. Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development including its lifesaving aid to impoverished people around the globe upset Ms. Wiles. “I was initially aghast,” she told Mr. Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

Mr. Musk’s approach was “not the way I would do it.” She said she called Mr. Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalled telling him. She said that Mr. Musk was a disrupter. “But no rational person could think the U.S.A.I.D. process was a good one. Nobody.”

She offered no objection to Mr. Trump’s saber rattling against Venezuela and bombing of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers, suggesting that regime change against President Nicolás Maduro was Mr. Trump’s real goal. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

She acknowledged that Mr. Trump, who lately has talked about mounting “land strikes” in Venezuela or elsewhere in the region, would need congressional authorization for that. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then you’d have to, then it’s war, then Congress,” she said.

Ms. Wiles expressed misgivings about how the roundup of immigrants has been carried out at times. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said. Criminals should be deported, she added. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” When two mothers were arrested and deported with their children after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings, she said, “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

She acknowledged sharp internal divisions over Mr. Trump’s announcement of major tariffs last spring. “There was a huge disagreement over whether” tariffs were “a good idea,” she said. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it.’” But he announced them anyway and “it’s been more painful than I expected.”

Ms. Wiles confirmed that she wants Mr. Trump to talk more about the economy and less about Saudi Arabia. She denied that he would use the military to influence the midterm elections and ruled out his running again in 2028. His comments about seeking an unconstitutional third term are “100 percent” about “driving people crazy.”

As for the potential successors, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio, she distinguished how each of them came around to supporting Mr. Trump after initially opposing him. “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles,” she said. “He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” As for Mr. Vance, “his conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”

Mr. Rubio told Mr. 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.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.

[admin]

Erika And I Sat Down. Here’s What Happened. | Candace Ep 280
Candace Owens
Started streaming 59 minutes ago

NY Post publishes their latest hit piece on me, Tim Pool rants about my security again, and I sat down with Erika Kirk in Nashville.

[admin]

Trump's FBI In SHAMBLES As Staffers Reveal Director Downfall After Major Screw Up
by John Iadarola
The Damage Report
Dec 16, 2025 #TheDamageReport #JohnIadarola #TheYoungTurks

Donald Trump's FBI leaders, including Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, get hit with devastating news after staffers reveal their massive screw ups are likely to cause their imminent removal. John Iadarola breaks it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!



Transcript

Apparently, according to reports, we
might soon be seeing the last of FBI
Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director
of the FBI Dan Bongino. They could soon
both be gone. Or maybe one of them is
already gone. Actually, we're not sure.
But why? Why would they be going? Well,
Cash Patel has bungled maybe one too
many responses to uh tragedies, to
massacres, and uh Dan Bongino apparently
literally has not shown up to work for
weeks. And so there's three different
sources inside of the FBI that have been
talking to the media about this. And
look, we know that Kash Patel has really
bungled things in a way that has made
him kind of a laughingstock both inside
and outside of the FBI. And remember, he
started off a laughing. He's not a guy
who was qualified for the position. It
was ridiculous that this fawning,
sycophantic conspiracy theorist would be
put in charge of the FBI. It's a dark
mark that hopefully we'll be able to
forget about in the future. That was how
he started. And then of course there was
this Sunday where we had the terrible
shooting at Brown that left two students
dead. So he posted on X this really long
thing where he used a bunch of, you
know, like FBIish words that he probably
had to Google to imply that he's doing
geolocation and thanks to that we've
caught a person of interest. And I think
that if you've been paying attention to
Cash Patel and the FBI throughout this
year, it kind of felt like the immediate
aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk
where uh FBI director Kash Patel wants
to seem like he's got things under
control. So he jumps out there and
perhaps jumps ahead of the facts and
that is what happened here. So he's got
another long message. You can see it's
just everybody everybody stop tweeting
long ass. If you want to write a book,
write a book, okay? Don't do it bit by
bit on Twitter. But anyway, um, no, they
didn't catch the right person. And by
the way, like that itself is not a major
issue or a major surprise. It's just
that he shouldn't have posted the tweet
in the first place. You're in the
immediate aftermath of something like
that. Okay, they're they're they're
they're getting the video, they're
talking to people, they're pulling
people in. Just let it chill for a
second. But he's so hungry. He's so
tryhard. He is so horny to seem like he
knows what he's doing that yet again he
jumped out and made it seem as if they
caught the person and they didn't. And
that makes it twice as bad for
everybody. People are already scared and
then they get a brief moment of thinking
oh we got the guy and then oh wait no we
don't actually and then the fear the
terror that it could happen again comes
rushing back in. Cash Patel did that.
Okay. And it was the second time that he
did it. Remember this same thing
happened after Charlie Kirk was killed.
Take a look.
when we were still looking for the guy.
I know you posted that we got him uh and
that ended up not being true. You took
some incoming because of that. What led
to you posting that? Why did you feel so
certain about it? And what do you have
to say about the criticism?
No, I appreciate this opportunity. Look,
as I stated, I was being transparent
with working with the public on our
findings as I had them. I stated in that
message that that we had a subject and
uh that we were going to interview him
and we did and he was released. The job
of the FBI is not just to manhunt the
actual suspect who did the killing or
suspects, but it's also to eliminate
targets and eliminate subjects who are
not involved in the process. And that's
what we were doing. Could I have worded
it a little better in the heat of the
moment? Sure. But do I regret putting it
out? Absolutely not.
First of all, let me just say I love
that his voice is exactly what it is. I
wouldn't change anything for him. I'm
very glad about that. But second of all,
yeah, he's very glad for the opportunity
to answer to the fact that people are
losing faith in him and and it's just,
you know, we have to eliminate target.
You know, no, no, we we understand that
the FBI, the actual people in the FBI,
they they understand that. Nobody's
questioning any of that, Cash. Nobody's
like, nobody's questioning the process.
They're questioning you and the fact
that you keep trying to make yourself
look cool. You're the one that flies out
and then takes coats off of people and
then begs for like patches to make
yourself. You are so pathetic and
cringy. You honestly make you make
Christy Gnome look a little bit less
embarrassing by compar like she gets
covered a lot more for that sort of
thing. But he is just as desperate to
look serious to look reputable as
Christy Gnome. We we need to make sure
that we spread the the criticism out. Uh
that's what they were criticizing. And
so like this is two strikes now and it's
making the FBI look like a
laughingstock. This is not what Donald
Trump chose him for. I don't know what
Donald Trump chose him for, but it
definitely wasn't this. So he could be
going soon. According to those three
sources, the FBI is in shambles. Morale
is at an all-time low. The cause is at
the top. Yeah, it was a dude who wrote a
pathetic, fawning children's book and
did some podcasts and that was it.
That's why he chose if I was a lifetime
uh you know career FBI agent, I would
probably be in low morale, too. But it
isn't just him. It's also Dan Bongino.
You haven't heard a lot about Dan Bongino
for some time. And there's a reason for
that. He's not really doing anything.
Like he's occasionally tweeting about
something that the FBI is doing, but
that that might like make it seem as if
he's involved in it. I mean, after all,
he's part of the leadership of the FBI,
right?
Maybe kind of. According to uh reports
from inside of the FBI, he has not been
seen in his office for more than two
weeks. It has apparently been empty for
half a month at this point, indicating
to some that he has actually already
left the agency. It just hasn't been
announced yet. And that that might seem
a little bit crazy, but remember Trump
wants to make it seem as if there's not
this turnover that the embarrassing
pathetic toadies that he chose to staff
his regime with uh don't need to be
replaced and actual experts put in. And
so one way that you do that is by not
actually firing them. But if it comes to
the point where you have to fire them or
maybe Dan Bino realizes that his
reputation is just taking too many hits
over the fact that he's just sitting,
you know, in the the Epstein
investigation cuck chair and doing
absolutely nothing uh for the victims.
Maybe he wants to leave and he just
doesn't want to be around anymore. But
either way, he he apparently hasn't been
working. And if that's the case, I feel
like he shouldn't be getting paid. Like,
doesn't he kind of owe us? Like, we pay
for that. we pay for his salary. If he's
not actually clocking in, why the hell
are we paying him that? And I I'm
assuming it's quite a bit of money. So
anyway, uh if he does go, I I think that
the FBI is going to be perfectly fine
with it. One of the staffers asked by
Salon said nobody here will miss him of
Dan Bino. He has no credibility,
obviously. Like, but again, who would
expect that? It's Dan Bonino.
Who thinks he had any credibility? I
guess Trump I guess Trump is stupid
enough to look at Dan Bino and be like I
guess I guess he looks like he could be
an FBI guy or whatever. No, he was never
made for the job. He had no prior FBI
experience. He had previously been a
Secret Service agent and a New York
police officer. I would love to talk to
people who knew him when he was in the
Secret Service about what he was
actually doing at that point. And then
he was just he was a crappy podcaster.
He got fired by the uh the NRA network
and eventually I think he worked for Fox
or whatever. It's utterly that's what
he's made for. And and by the way,
remember he did that interview not that
many days ago where he talked about his
past. I think he's starting to miss it
when you can just pull conspiracy
theories and racist tropes out of your
ass and for some reason generate an
audience and get paid for it. Maybe
that's what he's been doing for the past
couple weeks is prepping for the launch
of his next show. Anyway, uh if he does
end up staying, an FBI source says he
has no future here even if he stays.
Yeah. All of these people, and that
includes Christy Gnome, they technically
work at these places. But if any work is
getting done at these places, and I
question whether it's some of them it
is, it's all just being done around
them. They have nothing to do with it
because they don't know anything about
it.

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff On Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2). Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple has interviewed Wiles amid each moment of crisis. This insider’s account joins a portfolio of portraits for an unflinching, up-close look at power—and peril.
by Chris Whipple
Photographer Christopher Anderson
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/79tgs#selection-505.0-559.17
https://archive.is/9ohH5#selection-109.0-1957.63


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.

Click here to read Part 2 of 2 from Vanity Fair’s portfolio of Trump’s inner circle.

Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.

“I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” said Susie Wiles. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.

We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.)

Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

SUSIE WILES
THE ENFORCER

The architect of President Donald Trump's 2024 election victory, now his WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFFs, is the daughter of the famous sportscaster Pat Summerall. As Wiles explains, her father waws an alcoholic, so she knows how to deal with difficult men with big personalities. "I make a specialty of it," she says with a laugh. As the crises of Trump 2.0 pile up -- from Signalgate to revenge and retribution to the Epstein files to alleges war crimes on the high seas -- Wiles has worked at the center of the storm, the Trump whisperer who sees it all. "I am entering my ninth year altogether, my fifth year day-to-day," she says of working with Trump. "So it's hard to surprise me."

“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”

“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.

***

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

JD VANCE
THE HEIR APPARENT

Once a fierce critic of Trump -- who could be "America's Hitler," Vance said in 2016 -- the VICE PRESIDENT is now his highest-ranking acolyte, a 180-degree transformation that Wiles calls "sort of political." In the wake of his friend Charlie Kirk's assassination, Vance spoke of the "festering violence on the far left," helping fuel Trump's campaign of revenge and retribution against political enemies. "A conspiracy theorist for a decade," according to Wiles, Vance keeps a close eye on the views of younger voters.

At the same time, Trump has waged war on his political enemies; pardoned the January 6 rioters, firing nearly everyone involved in their investigation and prosecution; sued media companies into multimillion-dollar settlements; indicted multiple government officials he perceives as his foes; and pressured universities to toe his line. He’s redefined the way presidents behave—verbally abusing women, minorities, and almost anyone who offends him. Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September turbocharged Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution. Critics have compared this moment to a Reichstag fire, a modern version of Hitler’s exploitation of the torching of Berlin’s parliament.

Historically, the White House chief of staff is the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, and executor of his agenda. That often means telling the president hard truths. Upon taking office, Ronald Reagan was hell-bent on reforming Social Security. James A. Baker III explained to him that cutting Social Security benefits was the third rail of American politics. Reagan pivoted to tax cuts—and was ultimately reelected in a landslide. Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s chief, explained: “The White House chief of staff is the one person besides his wife…who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’ ”

Just how far will Trump veer off the guardrails of democracy?

The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?

T-MINUS 9 DAYS
January 11, 2025

Our first conversation took place little more than a week before the inauguration. Wiles called from the road, en route from Mar-a-Lago to her home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in her BMW 530. She was in high spirits, basking in Trump’s victory. Not that she’d ever doubted the outcome. “At no point did I think we would not win,” she said. “Not in my core, not in my sleep, not in my rational mind.”

In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”

But on that January day, as his second inauguration approached, Wiles was determined to show the world a new Trump. “I told Hakeem Jeffries, ‘You will see a different Donald Trump when he gets there,’ ’’ she recounted to me. “I’ve not seen him throw anything, I’ve not seen him scream. I didn’t see that really horrible behavior that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago.”

Wiles’s childhood had prepared her for difficult men. She was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey, the only daughter and eldest of three siblings. It was her famous father, Pat Summerall, who put Wiles on a path to the pinnacle of political power. Summerall had been a kicker for the New York Giants and afterward parlayed his knowledge and mellifluous baritone into fame and fortune as the “voice of the NFL.”

At her father’s knee, Susie Summerall became a football aficionado, rattling off win-loss records and player stats like a miniature John Madden—an ability she says Trump shares. “The president, it turns out, is a junkie of that and is like a statistical savant,” she said. “And I remember a lot of it.” As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father’s 1970s Manhattan. “Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the ’70s I lived through with my dad,” she said. “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era: “That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. and all, those are things that he wants to talk about.”

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

STEPHEN MILLER
THE ZEALOT

Trump's DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR POLICY AND HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER is the tip of the spear for the president's weaponized roundups of immigrants and the take-no-prisoners approach to alleged drug smugglers. Utterly loyal and a fierce protector of the president's secrets, Miller is a battle-tested soldier in Trump's war against the "deep state." Says Miller: "We come into the second term fully, completely ready and prepared to content with that bureaucracy and ultimately to impose democratic will onto that bureaucracy."

The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.

“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.”

Susie Summerall got her first taste of politics in the late 1970s, interning as a college student in the Capitol Hill office of Jack Kemp, the New York congressman, who’d been a Giant with her father. Then, at 23, she landed a job in the Reagan White House as a scheduler, where she watched his chief of staff Baker in action. She married a GOP advance man, Lanny Wiles, and in 1984 they moved to Ponte Vedra. Wiles wanted to “start a family and a life outside politics.” But in 1988, Baker lured Wiles back to work with Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s running mate. The couple had two daughters, Katie and Caroline. Wiles plunged into state politics—and over the next two decades became a formidable political strategist, serving as chief of staff to the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, running Rick Scott’s gubernatorial campaign, and, briefly, leading Jon Huntsman’s campaign for president.

In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower to meet the real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate. The star of The Apprentice couldn’t believe he was talking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall. “He’s said it a million times,” Wiles said. “ ‘I judge people by their genes.’ ” Wiles thought Trump was interesting and smart. “And they called me one night and said, ‘We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ ”

“I had become disenchanted with what we now call traditional Republicans,” she recalled.

Wiles’s relationship with Trump almost ended at his Miami golf club one night in the fall of 2016. Unhappy with a poll showing him doing worse than expected in Florida, Trump berated her in front of a gaggle of cronies. “It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles told me. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

DAN SCAVINO
THE CADDIE

The DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF AND DIRECTOR OF PRESIDENTIAL PERSONNEL is a social media obsessive and veteran of Trump's first term. (He's also an former golf club manager and as a teenager toted the president's clubs.) "When we came into office in Trump 1.0", he says, "the Russia hoax kicked in right away, and it was nothing but investigation after investigation after investigation. This go-around, we came in, we won. There's no investigations. We control the House, the Senate, and the White House, and the president can focus on his policies." Scavino says Trump is relentless. "My toughest challenge is honestly keeping up with the president, because he is literally nonstop, he's always go, go, go."

Wiles steeled herself. “I finally said, ‘You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice.’ ” Wiles walked out. Trump turned on a dime. “Lo and behold, he called me every day.” Wiles never looked back. Trump carried Florida, the first big prize in his stunning 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton.

Then, in a fateful turn of events, Wiles went to work in 2018 for an ambitious gubernatorial candidate named Ron DeSantis. (Trump urged DeSantis, then his protégé, to hire her.) She led the underdog candidate to victory. But afterward, DeSantis turned on her, denouncing Wiles publicly and bad-mouthing her privately. To this day, Wiles doesn’t know what triggered the governor’s vendetta. “I think he thought I was getting too much attention, which is ironic,” she told me. “I don’t ever seek attention.”

George W. Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush. “He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning.”

Wiles landed on her feet, organizing Florida for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. Trump had rescued Wiles, recently divorced, at a dark moment in her life. (Wiles and her husband divorced in 2017—due, she has said, to his bad financial decisions.) Looking back on DeSantis’s behavior, Wiles reflected: “Had he said, ‘Look, thank you. I appreciate your help. We’re done here.’ I believe the course of his history would have been different. I might or might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.”

DAY 1
January 20, 2025

On Trump’s first day in office, the president signed a flurry of executive orders, 26 in all, withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, rescinding birthright citizenship, sending troops to the southern border, freezing foreign aid, and stopping federal hiring. Then Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)


A picture of old friends in better times.


A statuette of President Donald Trump sits at the copier in Susie Wiles’s support-staff office.


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. departs the White House on November 13.

Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’ ”

“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

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.

During Oval Office events, Wiles almost always sits just off camera. “There’s the president and then there’s whoever the three high-ranking people are on the sofa,” she said. “And then there’s a chair at the corner of the sofa, which is my chair, which means I’m the one that gets hit in the head with the boom mic.”

For all the chaos in the Cabinet, Wiles has kept palace intrigue and shivving to a minimum in the White House. Trump has empowered her; when Wiles weighs in, everyone knows she is speaking for him. She has in turn empowered her team: Blair, Miller, Scavino, and Taylor Budowich, who departed in September.


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

“First and foremost, she brings no ego,” says Blair. “And that is the starting point from which just an immense amount of power flows. There’s so much ego and testosterone around her, there wouldn’t be any room for hers anyway.”

From day one, Wiles had to grapple with another power center: Elon Musk.

“He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”

Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.

“She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff said. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.”

Wiles continued: “So Marco is on his way to Panama. We call him and say, ‘You’re Senate-confirmed. You’re going to have to be the custodian, essentially, of [USAID].’ ‘Okay,’ he says.” But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants. In an interview with The Financial Times, Bill Gates remarked: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

Privately, another drama was playing out.

Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush. “He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”

Did Rubio have any regrets about the untold number of lives that PEPFAR’s evisceration might cost? “No. First of all, whoever says that, it’s just not being accurate,” he told me. “We are not eviscerating PEPFAR. PEPFAR has been rearranged and reorganized in such a way where we’re now going to be able to deliver aid in a way that has a goal. The goal is to help countries become self-sustaining.” With a note of “America First,” he added: “Let’s begin with the premise: Is it the United States’ fault? Why isn’t China paying for more immunizations? Why isn’t the UK or Canada or any of the G7 countries?” (The UK, following in the footsteps of the US, slashed foreign aid in 2025. In November, China, which funded the Africa CDC, pledged $3.5 million in AIDS prevention in South Africa alone.)

When I repeated Rubio’s comment to a former GOP White House chief of staff, he remarked: “I find that immoral.”

DAY 8
January 27, 2025

“Our job is lethality and readiness and war fighting.” —Pete Hegseth on his first day at the Pentagon, days after Vance cast the tiebreaking vote in his Senate confirmation

For Trump, Wiles has helped pick a Cabinet of MAGA hard-liners: Pete Hegseth, secretary of war (formerly defense); Kash Patel, FBI director; John Ratcliffe, CIA director; Pam Bondi, attorney general; Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence; and Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. Wiles calls them “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.” Trump’s Cabinet members are either one of the least qualified presidential teams in history or, to hear Wiles tell it, disrupters—the only people with the balls to take on an entrenched deep state.

“It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles said of an interaction with Trump in 2016. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”

“People talk about the deep state being at the State Department,” Wiles said. “It’s not. It’s the military-industrial complex.” Hegseth, in her view, is just the guy to take on the powers that be. She referred to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another world-class disrupter, as “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby.” In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.” (In December, Kennedy’s federal vaccine panel voted to end the decades-long recommendation for newborn vaccinations against hepatitis B, which is highly infectious and causes liver failure.)

DAY 56
March 16, 2025

“US deports hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, despite court order.” —NPR

In mid-March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) shackled and herded 238 immigrants onto transport planes and flew them to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. According to Trump, the men were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, but the evidence was sketchy (often based on tattoos alone). Most had committed no serious crimes; one, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported by mistake, the Trump administration admitted.


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

“I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” Wiles told me at the time.

When we spoke again in April, in cities across the country, masked ICE agents were snatching people off the street, throwing them in vans, and zip-tying and frog-marching them into makeshift deportation camps. Many were US citizens or entitled to be here. (ProPublica documented 170 cases in the first nine months of 2025 of US citizens being caught up in ICE’s dragnet.)

“I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.”

“If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever,” Wiles told me. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” But as the usa.gov site itself notes, “In some cases, a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in immigration court.” Not long after the El Salvador deportation fiasco, in Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers, along with their children, ages seven, four, and two, to Honduras. The children were US citizens and the four-year-old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn’t explain it.

“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said of the case, in which both mothers had reportedly been arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings. “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

DAY 74
April 3, 2025

“Long-threatened tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have plunged the country into trade wars abroad….” —PBS News

The president declared April 2 “Liberation Day,” bragging about billions of dollars that would flow into US coffers from tariffs, refusing to acknowledge that the levies were a tax on consumers.

The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?

“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
At the time this article went to press, shortly before the December holidays, a Harvard poll showed 56 percent of voters think Trump’s tariff policies have harmed the economy.

At the time this article went to press, shortly before the December holidays, a Harvard poll showed 56 percent of voters think Trump’s tariff policies have harmed the economy.

DAY 207
August 14, 2025

“National Guard mobilizes 800 troops in DC to Support Federal, Local Law Enforcement—Trump declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital.” —US Department of War

During the summer, Trump ordered the National Guard into four Democratic-led cities, claiming the troops were needed to crack down on crime and protect federal immigration facilities. In June the president deployed some 4,000 guard troops to Los Angeles; later he sent them to Washington, describing the city’s crime rate as “out of control.” “This was like a vitamin boost of ICE, of the [National] Guard, of the Park Service police, who actually have more authority than the DC Metro Police,” Wiles said. “And the idea was to right the ship and then slowly back off. And that’s what we’re doing.”

“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio said of Wiles. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.”

Critics denounced the deployments as unconstitutional, performative, and ineffective, and many feared Trump had another, more sinister plan up his sleeve.

Will the president use the military to suppress or even prevent voting during the midterms and beyond?

“I say it is categorically false, will not happen, it’s just wrongheaded,” she snapped.

“Do you understand where people who think that are coming from?” I asked.

“I do a little bit, but not fully. I mean, I think they hate the president. They think he’s too wrapped up in what happened in 2020.”

The president and his team were pushing almost every legal and constitutional boundary and defying courts to stop them. But would Trump obey the Supreme Court? “Do you think he will adhere to whatever the courts decide in the end?” I asked Wiles. “I do,” she replied. But Wiles made a prediction: “The smart lawyers around us think that we will be slowed down, as we already have been, but we will ultimately prevail.”

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Part 2 of 2

EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2)
Trump’s chief reveals her thoughts on the first year, and on the team she’s built with JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, Marco Rubio, and 3 more key players. Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple reports.
by Chris Whipple
Vanity Fair
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/9ohH5


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

DAY 289
November 4, 2025

The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency.

Click here read Part 1 of 2 from Vanity Fair’s portfolio of Trump’s inner circle.

Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)

Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

KAROLINE LEAVITT
THE MOUTHPIECE

The combative WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY fields questions from the press corps with all the subtlety of a rottweiler. Wiles calls her a "scary good" communicator, right up there with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. "The president doesn't give a crap if you're a man or a woman," Leavitt says. "He just wants you to be good at your job." How's she faring in the onslaught of questions about the Epstein files after Trump's about-face? "It's pretty clear he wants us to be aggressively offensive when it comes to this issue."

Not far from where we sat was a gaping hole where the East Wing had been until just days before. I asked her about the fierce criticism that followed its demolition to make way for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom. “Were you surprised by it?”

“No,” Wiles replied. “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”

Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations?

“I’m not telling.”

T-MINUS 232 DAYS
June 2, 2024

“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” —Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy
“Yeah....I think I would.” —Trump

For many of Trump’s followers, it’s an article of faith that the US government has long been run by an elite cabal of pedophiles. Less conspiratorially but no less seriously, others question whether politicians and powerful people either participated in or knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women, from his posh Manhattan town house to his private Caribbean islands. Perhaps most critical to Trump followers, though, is the fact that Trump indicated a willingness to release the files—and didn’t. As this article went to press, grand jury material from the Epstein records was due to be released in December.

What about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud?
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Susie Wiles replied.

Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”

In February, Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

As Noah Shachtman reported in Vanity Fair, “dozens and dozens” of FBI agents at the New York field office were tasked with combing through the Epstein files. Many observers assumed they were looking for (and possibly redacting) Trump’s name. “I don’t know how many agents looked through things, but it was a lot,” said Wiles. “They were looking for 25 things, not one thing.”

Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” (Trump started dating Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005, sometime in 1998. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser, who died by suicide earlier this year, first met Epstein while she was a Mar-a-Lago spa worker in 2000. Trump and Epstein reportedly had a falling out in 2004.)

Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”

The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

MARCO RUBIO
THE HAWK

A double threat -- both SECRETARY OF STATE AND NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER (the first since Henry Kissinger) -- Rubio takes a hard line against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and a softer line against Russian president Vladimir Putin. (Infer what you will from the gator skull he keeps on display.) "I think the president is losing his patience through the process," Rubio says of administration talks with Putin to end the Ukraine War. "He's given Putin every opportunity to get to yes. But so far, Putin has not taken that."

In July, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, traveled to a Tallahassee, Florida, courthouse to interview Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021, she received a 20-year prison sentence. “It’s not typical, is it,” I asked Wiles, “to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” According to Wiles, “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.”

Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)

“Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’” Wiles said of Trump. “And then he immediately says, ‘Not really.”

What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.” Trump’s lawyers filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which the defendants have asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss.

So will the president sit for a deposition in that process?

“I mean, if he had to,” she said.

The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”

A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

JAMES BLAIR
THE BULLDOG

The 36-year-old White House DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR LEGISLATIVE, POLITICAL, AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS is one of Wiles's favored "junkyard dogs." Blair says Trump's "genius is being able to simplify, like don't use a $10 word when a $2 word will do. He has a real talent for just cutting through all the bullshit and the clutter and getting down to brass tacks." Staring down a possible GOP shellacking in the 2026 midterms, Blair says the Epstein scandal is one of the big threats. But he's "more worried about making sure people are feeling economically better a year from now. Because even if Epstein were perfect but they don't feel good about economics, we're fucked."

Vance keeps his eye on the voters. “It’s Epstein, Gaza, and the coziness with Israel,” said this White House source. “If you dive deeply into the internet, you’ll find things that say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put Bibi at the Resolute Desk?’ ” the source said, referring to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Across our year of conversations, Wiles wanted to put an end to what she believes is a persistent myth, that Trump is a warmonger. To the contrary, Wiles says, the president genuinely cares about ending wars and saving human lives. “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing, which is not, I don’t think, where he was in his last term,” she said. “Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.” Whether that thought is genuine or driven by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize is, of course, open to debate.

DAY 213
August 20, 2025

“Israel says it has taken first steps of military operation in Gaza City.” —Reuters

In early October, Trump announced that his envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bloodshed in Gaza. The 20-point plan, calling for the disarmament of Hamas and the administering of Gaza by a multinational force, was far from a sure thing. But the ceasefire and the release of almost all the hostages (the remains of one are still missing) was a considerable achievement. During his triumphant appearance at Israel’s Knesset, Trump struck a bellicose tone, praising Netanyahu and the Israeli armed forces with no mention of the Palestinian civilian casualties. Trump had previously lauded Bibi’s efforts in another action by calling him a “war hero”—a remark partially aimed at Israelis. Talking about it then, Wiles winced. “I’m not sure he fully realizes,” she said, “that there’s an audience here that doesn’t love it.”

When I asked her last fall what she thought Trump’s greatest achievement had been in 2025, Wiles was upbeat: “I think the country is beginning to see that he’s proud to be an agent of peace. I think that surprises people. Doesn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t fit with the Donald Trump people think they know. I think this legislation [the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill], which funded the entire domestic agenda, is a huge accomplishment. And even though it isn’t popular in total, the component parts of it are. And that will be a very big deal in the midterms.”

DAY 287
November 2, 2025

“Three killed in latest US strike on alleged drug boat in Caribbean.” —BBC News

During my first visit with Wiles at the White House in November, Trump’s revenge tour against his domestic enemies was in full swing. So was his lethal campaign against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who, Trump was convinced, headed a powerful drug cartel. Over lunch, Wiles told me about Trump’s Venezuela strategy: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” (Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.)

What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”

I’d already pressed Wiles on Trump’s practice of blowing boats out of the water. The casualties almost certainly include unsuspecting fishermen. In 2016, Trump had famously mused that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Now he seemed to be testing that idea on the global stage. When a critic on X denounced these killings as “war crimes,” Vance posted: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Pressed at an October press conference on why he didn’t just ask Congress for a declaration of war, Trump swatted the question away: “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay?” I asked Wiles: “What do you say to people who ask, doesn’t anybody in this administration have a heart?”

Wiles didn’t mince words: “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times…. These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege.” The boats, she argued, carried drugs; eliminating them saves lives. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”

As of this article’s publication, at least 87 people had been killed in US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had directed the US military to “kill everybody” in a strike on a boat; this was followed by a second strike that killed two survivors—a possible war crime. Hegseth said an admiral was responsible for the second strike. Congressional Democrats and even some Republicans were talking about calling hearings to investigate the matter.

“Drug smuggling,” I pointed out to Wiles, “is not a death penalty offense, even if the president wishes it were.”


Wiles’s office bookshelf featuring a replica FIFA trophy and some unsubtle Wicked Witch imagery.


A Marine stands sentry.


The flag from JD Vance's inauguration ceremony.

“No, it’s not. I’m not saying that it is. I’m saying that this is a war on drugs. [It’s] unlike another one that we’ve seen. But that’s what this is.”

“Obviously it’s a war declared only by the president and without any congressional approval,” I said.

“Don’t need it yet,” Wiles replied.

“We’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up,” she’d told me during lunch in November. “One of the great untold stories of the US government is the talents of the CIA. And there may be an interest in going inside territorial waters, which we have permission [to do] because they’re skirting the coastline to avoid getting [caught].” But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress. But Marco and JD, to some extent, are up on the Hill every day, briefing.”

In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”

In October I asked Rubio what legal authority the administration had to conduct its lethal strikes. “Obviously, that’s a DOD [Department of Defense] operation,” he replied. “So I’m not in any way disavowing it. I agree with it 100 percent. I think we’re on very strong, firm footing, but I don’t want to be giving legal answers on behalf of the White House or the Department of War.” The secretary of state was unequivocal about the targets of the US strikes. “These are not alleged drug dealers,” he said. “These are drug dealers. Where are the YouTube videos of the family saying my poor innocent fisherman son, you know, was killed?”

DAY 40
February 28, 2025

“Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy get into heated exchange during Oval Office meeting.” —Face the Nation

I asked Wiles what she makes of the president’s affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who seems to have cast a spell over Trump since he first ran for president. In 2018 the leaders met in Finland, where Trump appeared to side with Putin when asked whether he believed him about Moscow’s noninterference in the 2016 election. “Watching it at a distance in Helsinki,” she recalled, “I thought there was a real sort of friendship there, or at least an admiration. But on the phone calls that we’ve had with Putin, it’s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.”

Vance, Rubio, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an informal adviser, have been running Trump’s foreign policy since the departure of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who was moved to UN ambassador after Signalgate. “I’m not horrified by it,” Wiles said of the infamous unsecured chat about US attack plans against the Houthis to which The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly admitted. She noted, with an edge, “The burden’s on us to make sure that [national security] conversations are preserved. In this case, Jeff Goldberg did it for us.”

Wiles said she saw trouble brewing before Trump’s infamous Oval Office scrum with Volodymyr Zelenskyy last February, when the president and Vance berated Ukraine’s leader on worldwide television. “If we had it to do over,” Wiles said, “I wouldn’t have cameras, because it was going to end that way.”

Wiles claims the ugly spectacle was the culmination of churlish behind-the-scenes behavior by Zelenskyy and his entourage. It began with Zelenskyy failing to show up for a meeting with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent when he visited Kyiv to make a deal on mineral rights—and escalated. “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.”

The Trump-Putin relationship has zigged and zagged. In the walk-up to the August summit with Putin in Alaska, Trump had publicly sought a ceasefire in Ukraine. It seemed he was finally getting tough with Putin. But in fact, Trump gave up on a ceasefire before the Anchorage meeting began.


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

Trump’s team was divided on whether Putin’s goal was anything less than a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine. “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.

In October I asked Rubio if that was true. “There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.” (In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”)

Will Marco Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “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.”

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.” During another visit to the White House on November 13, when I asked Vance about his conversion to Trump loyalist, he said: “I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country.”

Will Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “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.”

Wiles is known for having an open-door policy. Trump sometimes comes in unannounced (“he apparently never did in the first administration”). During lunch, no one interrupted us, and Wiles checked her phone only once. She was enjoying a rare moment of downtime. “They don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, motioning toward the Oval, and laughed out loud. After an hour, as I got up to go, I told her about how President Barack Obama’s chief Rahm Emanuel used to complain to visitors about how thankless his job was: “This is nice,” he said, pointing to the wood-burning fireplace, “and this is nice,” gesturing toward the outdoor patio. “And everything in between sucks.” Wiles replied: “I don’t feel that way at all.”

In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Vladimir Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”

To the left of the fireplace was a freestanding video monitor: a live feed of Trump’s Truth Social posts.

The average tenure for a modern White House chief of staff is a year and a half. George W. Bush’s Andrew Card holds the record at five years and three months. Wiles may yet eclipse Trump’s so-far longest-lasting chief, John Kelly, at 17 months. If she chose to quit, Wiles could make a fortune running the campaign of any number of would-be GOP nominees; though Wiles says she earned around $350,000 for her role managing Trump’s 2024 campaign, she was reported to have made millions more through her consulting firm (Wiles had not replied when asked about this by the time this article went to print). When reports emerged that Biden aide Mike Donilon stood to make $8 million if his boss had stayed in the race and won, Wiles said her co–campaign chair Chris LaCivita sent her a note that said, “Boy, am I stupid. Why was [ I] so cheap?

Wiles says she’d originally planned to serve as chief for six months. “I have not had a day I would describe as overwhelming, though there’s plenty of frustration here. But you go to bed at night, you say your prayers, and you get up and do it again.” I asked her about her health and the president’s. “Mine is good,” she said. “His is great. My kids are grown. I’m divorced. This is what I do if I stay four years.”

In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”

What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women, as when, in November, he snapped “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female reporter from Bloomberg? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”

Will the president sit for a deposition in his Jeffrey Epstein-related suit against the Wall Street Journal?
“I mean, if he had to,” Wiles said.

Is Wiles really irreplaceable, as Rubio said? “Not patting myself on the back, but just recognizing the reality of this president at this time,” she said, “I’m just not [sure] who else could do this.”

In August I’d asked her if she felt she would outlast her Trump predecessors. “As long as I still feel honored to do it, and I feel like things are going well, we’re moving the country forward positively,” she’d said. “It’s two steps forward, one step back. I get that. But it’s two steps nobody else could make.”

“Will the president run for a third term?” I asked in November.

“No,” she said and then added, “But he sure is having fun with it.” Wiles said he knows it’s “driving people crazy.”

“So that’s why he talks about it,” I said.

“Yeah, 100 percent.”

“Would you say categorically no, and that the 22nd Amendment rules out [a third term]?”

“I do. Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer, but based on my reading of it, it’s pretty unequivocal.”

“And has he told you that in so many words?”

“Yes. Oh, a couple times, yeah.”


Photographer Christopher Anderson.

And then she went on. “Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’ And then he immediately says, ‘Not really. I will have served two terms and I will have gotten done what I need to get done, and it’s time to give somebody else a chance.’ So, you know, any given day, right? But he knows he can’t run again.”

Months earlier she’d mused on the future of the party and the need for it to turn Trump voters into Republican voters. “Donald Trump will be an ex-president,” she said, looking ahead. And “I’ll be gone to do whatever I do next, which hopefully will be nothing.”

The 2026 midterm elections may determine the fate of Trump’s presidency. Vance told me that he hopes to minimize GOP losses in 2026. “I think a good midterm election for an incumbent presidency would be to lose a dozen seats in Congress and two or three seats in the Senate,” he said. “I think it will be better than that.” I asked Wiles for her prediction. “We’re going to win the midterms,” she said crisply.

DAY 15
February 3, 2025

A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump found himself taking stock. “How is it that you’re doing this so well?” he asked Wiles. “Sir,” Wiles replied, “remember that I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you.” She was paraphrasing one of James Baker’s favorite maxims.

Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked.”

But executing the president’s agenda requires telling him the truth. This is especially important when the president is surrounded by acolytes reading almost entirely from the same playbook. An effective chief steers the president clear of land mines. An ineffective one, by ducking tough conversations, lets him blunder into harm’s way. Four years into Reagan’s presidency, Baker, who understood the job, was replaced as White House chief by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, who didn’t. Soon after, an ill-fated scheme to trade arms to Iran for hostages was born. Richard Nixon overreacted to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by authorizing a special investigative unit in the White House nicknamed the “plumbers”; the result was the Watergate scandal.

Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, believes Trump and his team could fall victim to overreach. “There’s no doubt the Charlie Kirk assassination gives them an opportunity to put the left on its heels,” he told me. “They believe they are in an incredibly strong position to do whatever the hell they want,” said Daley. “And usually that’s when [people] make mistakes. They go too far.”

DAY 309
November 24, 2025

“US judge throws out criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James.” —The Guardian

In late September, in a message to “Pam,” his attorney general, Trump wrote (apparently inadvertently) on Truth Social that he’d been seeing posts online saying “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia [sic]??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” He told her, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”

Five days later, a federal grand jury indicted James Comey, the ex-FBI director, for making a false statement and obstructing a congressional investigation. Then, on October 9, 2025, a Virginia grand jury indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.

“There is no evidence” Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s island, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”

Back in March, on the 56th day of Trump’s presidency, I’d asked Wiles: “Do you ever go in to Trump and say, ‘Look, this is not supposed to be a retribution tour? ’”

“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”

In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”

“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said. “A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

“So all of this talk,” I said, “about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud….”

“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles replied.

“So you haven’t called him [out] on that, or said, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”

“No, no, not on her,” Wiles said. “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money!” Wiles laughed. (The massive civil fraud penalty won by the New York attorney general’s office in a case against Trump had just been thrown out by an appeals court.)

Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”

“Do you really think that Merrick Garland went after the president, persecuted him?” I’d asked her in March, referring to Biden’s buttoned-down, by-the-book attorney general.

“I do,” she replied, “and I think history will prove it to be so.”

In November, it was Comey’s turn in the dock. “So tell me why the Comey prosecution doesn’t just look like the fix is in,” I asked her.

“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

On November 24, a federal judge dismissed the Comey and James indictments, finding that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been appointed unlawfully. Bondi vowed to appeal both decisions—in the Comey case, the statute of limitations may prevent it. Still, Trump’s retribution campaign continued.

Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s formidable White House chief, has never met Wiles but observes, “A good chief of staff is willing to stand up and look the president in the eye and say no,” Panetta told me. “I’m not sure whether she’s an enabler,” he said, “or whether she’s somebody who’s a disciplinarian and wants to try to make sure that he does the right thing.”

Was Wiles saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed White House renovations?
“I’m not telling.”

Wiles told me in March that she had difficult conversations with Trump every day. “They’re over little things, not big,” she said. “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”

Wiles said Trump has been clear-eyed about what he wanted to do, “having not been there for four years and [having] had time to think about it.” And therefore she can pick her battles.

“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the stakes for Trump and his chief of staff couldn’t be higher. Trump’s second term has been more consequential than his first. He could leave office as a transformational president who sealed the southern border, passed major tax cuts, brought peace to Gaza, and re-created the GOP in his image. Or he could pursue reckless vendettas, shred democratic guardrails, and end up in the crosshairs of Democrat-led investigations. Either way, Wiles may be the thin line between the president and disaster. As one former GOP chief put it, “She may be more consequential than any of us.”

“I think what he meant by that,” I told Wiles, “is that we’ve never had a president who governs so much by whim and who depends so much on one person: you.”

“Oh, good Lord,” Wiles said. “Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”