White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has described teetotal Donald Trump as someone with an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Wiles, the usually media-shy top aide whom the president refers to as the “Ice Maiden,” made the remark in a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair.
The top Trump ally said she recognized aspects of the president’s boisterous personality from her alcoholic father—legendary NFL star and broadcaster Pat Summerall, who died in 2013 after being sober for 21 years.
“Some clinical psychologist who knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” Wiles said. “But high-functioning alcoholics, or alcoholics in general, have exaggerated personalities when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She added that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates with a view that there’s nothing he can’t do—nothing, zero, nothing.”
Trump does not drink, citing his older brother Fred Jr.’s struggles with alcoholism and his early death in 1981 at the age of 42.
In an August 2024 interview on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, Trump even suggested he could also have fallen into alcohol addiction if he were a drinker, meaning he wouldn’t “have been successful” in life.
“I had a great brother who taught me a lesson: Don’t drink,” Trump said at the time. “I would say that if I did drink, I could conceivably be the type of personality that would have—like you—that would have a problem.”
In another surprisingly candid 2019 interview with The Washington Post, Trump also lamented how years of alcohol abuse had affected his “handsome” brother physically.
“That had an impact on me, too,” Trump said. “He actually lived a long time longer than you would expect.”
Instead, the president has his own vice of Diet Coke, and he even has a button installed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that he presses to have the beverage delivered to him.
Wiles, the first woman to hold the role of White House chief of staff, has been a staunch Trump loyalist for years and served as his 2024 campaign manager.
She is known to be a hugely influential figure in Trump’s inner circle, despite taking more of a backseat role compared with some of the Trump White House’s more attention-craving figures.
“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 told Vanity Fair. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”
Wiles described first meeting Trump in 2015 on the set of The Apprentice, where she said the host was impressed that she was the daughter of Summerall.
“He’s said it a million times,” Wiles told the magazine. “‘I judge people by their genes.’”
Wiles said in March that she has 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 added that she can “pick her battles” about how confrontational she wants to be around Trump’s policies because the president apparently has a clear idea of how he wants to run the country.
“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a b---h. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
The interviews with Vanity Fair are an extraordinary moment for Wiles and Trump, with her dropping truth bomb after truth bomb about the president and his inner circle. This included suggesting Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and referring to former “first buddy” Elon Musk as an “avowed ketamine [user].”
She also openly calls the attempt to prosecute one of Trump’s enemies “retribution.” Such open and unvarnished truth-telling by any serving White House chief of staff is unprecedented. What it means for Wiles was unclear.
In response to the Vanity Fair profile, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast: “President Trump has no greater or more loyal adviser than Susie. The entire administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
Wiles also described the article on X as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”
