What the Hell Was Susie Wiles Thinking?

It was the political equivalent of Bill Belichick’s teenybopper girlfriend — a moment so utterly incomprehensible, all you could do was shake your head in disbelief when you heard the news. “Wait… WHAT happened?!”

Only this time, it wasn’t an old man in his 70s lusting after a babe in her 20s (which, if we’re being honest, is at least straightforwardly explainable).

It was a woman in her late 60s with a well-earned reputation as a shrewd, disciplined taskmaster getting bamboozled by the mainstream media. Susie Wiles was supposed to be every bit the super-genius strategist, game-manager, and cat-herder as Bill Belichick was a football savant.

But after her selfish unforced error with Vanity Fair, of all publications — in which she roped in every single top White House official, other than Donald Trump! — I’m wondering if her similarities to Belichick should be expanded.

Because it turns out that Bill Belichick looks a helluva lot smarter when Tom Brady is his quarterback. Without TB12, Belichick went from a football savant to a twice-fired ex-NFL coach (who just went 4-8 at the University of North Carolina).

And without Trump, I suspect Susie Wiles would look just as ordinary.

If you haven’t heard, Wiles agreed to ELEVEN separate interviews with Vanity Fair over the course of the year, culminating in yesterday’s hatchet piece (and all those absurdly unflattering close-up portraits). Which meant she invested a whole lot of time and energy to help the mainstream media lambast the Trump administration.

To paraphrase Jay Leno’s 1995 opening question to Hugh Grant: What the hell was she thinking?!

I don’t get it. I’ve been doing PR for 20+ years, and only once have I ever held job-ending leverage over the media. (During the Petraeus scandal, the Obama administration subpoenaed my off-the-record text messages and private emails with journalists. I fought to keep that stuff quiet, because my pals in the media would vent to me about their colleagues — and if those texts/emails were leaked, they’d be fired.) That was the ONLY time in my career where the “off-the-record” distinction was argued to protect the journalist, not the source.

Because the overwhelming majority of the time, the source is the vulnerable party; the journalist has all the leverage. The media gets the last word 100% of the time, because they’re the media.

Everyone knows this!

Yet Susie Wiles trusted Vanity Fair so thoroughly, she gave the journalist such mic-dropping material as:

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.”

And that was just in the first four paragraphs. (Hooray, another 140 to go.) In the article, she treated the journalist like he was her personal confidant, gossiping about Elon Musk’s (alleged) drug use, bashing cabinet members, critiquing Trump policy, and directly undermining ongoing criminal investigations.

That last one was a biggie.

This ran today on Zeteo, a leftist site:

Yesterday, after Vanity Fair published parts of its series of interviews with Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, my phone lit up with messages and calls from people working to impede the president’s authoritarian crusade to imprison a Who’s Who of his lengthy ‘enemies list.’ Some couldn’t believe their luck. “Thank God they’re this dumb,” one of these sources tells me.
Wiles told the magazine that Trump’s mission to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James “might be the one retribution.” When asked about Trump and his administration’s push to jail former FBI director James Comey, Wiles conceded: “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” She added that “when there’s an opportunity [for retribution], he will go for it.” Trump’s chief of staff told Vanity Fair that she and the president had “a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.” (Wiles, of course, failed to stop him.)
According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, multiple attorneys working on the legal defenses for different high-profile political targets of the Trump Justice Department immediately started strategizing over a key portion of the Wiles interviews — for which the writer, Chris Whipple, says there are audio recordings.
By Tuesday afternoon, the sources tell me, lawyers for a variety of Trump targets — those facing prosecution, those likely in-between criminal charges, those who aren’t charged yet but are getting their lives turned inside out by the feds — saw the Wiles tapes as a welcome opportunity.

What the hell was she thinking?!

All interviews require trust. And it’s certainly possible in PR for the source and the journalist to be great friends. (Some of my favorite drinking buddies work in media.) Depending on the circumstances, it can be a win-win relationship: The source helps the journalist tell a good story; the journalist helps the source by framing him or her in a positive light.

That’s normally what happens.

But the fundamental goal of a journalist is to tell the most exciting, newsworthy, and click-worthy story possible. Helping you look good is secondary.

If you straight-up tell a journalist that the president has an alcoholic’s personality, Musk is a “jacked-up Nosferatu” on ketamine, Trump and Epstein were “young single playboys together,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in her investigations, you can’t complain when the journalist uses it.

That’s their job!

Given that Wiles is a divorced woman in her 60s, I imagine Vanity Fair held a special place in her heart. (Which I totally get: I grew up on Sports Illustrated, so if SI offered to do a big profile on me, I’d probably take it… because I’m now in my 50s and running out of time for my SI cover.) Not to be unkind to Wiles, but she’s not the sort of woman that a brand like Vanity Fair normally celebrates, so it’s reasonable to assume that she delighted in their interest.

It probably felt validating. Maybe, if she also has an alcoholic’s personality, even intoxicating.

But you can’t put your ego ahead of the team like that!

She immediately attempted damage control:

The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.

Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the…
— Susie Wiles (@SusieWiles) December 16, 2025

Trouble is, in her X post, she never denied that those quotes came from her.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure her words were taken out of context. And I’m just as sure the journalist went out of his way to make her feel comfortable and at ease — which meant he probably pretended to be her friend.

(Welcome to political journalism, Susie.)

Bottom line? When you give a journalist juicy quotes like that, the [foul]-up is ALL on you. With her mouth, she handed Vanity Fair a loaded gun.

And then they used that gun to take shots at the Trump administration.

What’s most disconcerting is that we’ve learned something new about Wiles’ judgment: She has an astonishingly large blind spot. Instead of being the unflappable, hard-nosed, iron-willed realist who’s a super-genius at political warfare, she stumbled into an ambush that an amateur could see coming from miles away. It calls into question her instincts, wisdom, and decision-making.

This is the big leagues, Susie. We ain’t in Chapel Hill.

Going 4-8 won’t cut it.

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