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This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 16 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Political gravity is rapidly pulling the administration to earth. Donald Trump and his allies are flailing in a way that feels deeply, almost comfortingly familiar. They are unpopular and losing political capital, and they know it.
Like in all unhappy administrations, when things go bad, staffers start to go at one another’s throats. On Tuesday, the release of a huge two-part Vanity Fair piece with a top adviser to the president sent the White House into panic mode.
These are not background quotes from some disgruntled ex-assistant in the West Wing. These are on-the-record quotes from arguably the most powerful woman in America.
According to the president’s own handpicked chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and his conversion from never-Trumper to MAGA cheerleader was never principled but “sort of political.”
Wiles told Vanity Fair that Department of Government Efficiency architect Elon Musk was “an odd odd duck” and “an avowed ketamine [user].” When asked about one of Musk’s tweets demonizing public sector workers, she replied, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”
Wiles said that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, “completely whiffed” on the release of the Epstein files and that Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and the head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.”
Wiles also said that Trump, a man who does not drink, has “an alcoholic’s personality,” adding that he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
These are not background quotes from some disgruntled ex-assistant in the West Wing. These are on-the-record quotes from arguably the most powerful woman in America — a woman the president seems to love so much, he’s given her a special nickname: “Susie Trump.”
But it turns out, Wiles has been speaking very candidly to Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple about all kinds of issues for the entire year.
On Tuesday, the magazine published the results of those conversations: a two-part profile of Wiles, accompanied by a photo spread of her, flanked by other top White House officials, striking a glamorous pose.
In addition to the group photos, there were individual glamour shots for Vance, as well as for Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller and press secretary Karoline Leavitt, among others.
It seemed like those Trump officials thought they were going to look chic and fashionable. But after Whipple’s piece was released, the entire White House, in coordinated messaging on social media, called that spread “fake news” from the “radical left” and “nonsense” full of “false statements.”
It’s easy to see why they’re distancing themselves from the piece. During her conversations with Whipple, Wiles made an open admission that Trump is trying to abuse the law to go after his perceived enemies. The reporter wrote that back in March, he had 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, according to Whipple. “We have a loose agreement that the score-settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In late August, the Vanity Fair reporter referred to Wiles’ comments just a few months earlier: “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. “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.”
Trump’s chief of staff also revealed to Whipple what the president’s boat strikes in the Caribbean were really about. “Over lunch,” Whipple wrote, “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.’”
As the reporter noted, “Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.”
According to the piece, Wiles also revealed that she pressed Trump not to pardon all the Jan. 6 rioters, arguing that he should exclude the most violent and brutal participants in the insurrection attempt.
But then, Wiles explained to Whipple: “In every case, of the ones [Trump] 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.”
Whipple pointed out that’s also not true: “According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.”
But that one line from Wiles really typifies the MAGA mentality: “I sort of got on board.”
Now Wiles is blasting Vanity Fair for quoting her. In an interview with The New York Times, Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about Musk’s drug use. “That’s ridiculous,” she told the Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”
But, according to the paper, Whipple “played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.”
After that, the White House changed tack, seeming to admit Wiles was quoted correctly, but claiming she wasn’t quoted fairly.
“This was, unfortunately, another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously, and really did take the chief’s words out of context,” Leavitt said on Fox News. “But I think most importantly, the bias of omission was ever-present throughout this story. The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House.”
Maybe the White House is right. Perhaps there is some context, somehow, that will soften the assertions Wiles made. Though that seems pretty unlikely.
Over the weekend, they were still coming up with new ways to show the American people how gross and incompetent they are: from Trump’s deranged bashing of a beloved film icon after his slaying, to botching an investigation into a mass shooting at one of America’s oldest universities, to their feverish spinning of higher prices and economic turmoil.
On Tuesday, stocks fell on a delayed November job report that showed unemployment rising to 4.6%, its highest level in four years. In response, Vance blamed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.
“I believe the American people are going to reward us because the American people are smart,” Vance told a crowd in Pennsylvania. “They know Rome wasn’t built in a day. They know what Joe Biden broke is not gonna get fixed in a week. We gotta stay with it, we gotta keep on working on bringing good jobs and money back in the United States of America, and that will — it already has — paid major dividends for the American people. It’s gonna pay a lot more in the year to come.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” says the administration whose president promised he would fix the economy on Day 1.
These people are running around trying to bully their way through, as they always do. They won an election by 1.5% and pretended they were geniuses who had figured out some eternal truth and built an unstoppable political machine.
But almost a year into Trump’s first term, that’s starting to look like yet another scam sold to suckers.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
