JOYCE VANCE

 

Jack Smith Testifies Before The House Judiciary Committee

Making sense of the circus

Joyce Vance

Dec 16, 2025

On Wednesday, former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated and charged Donald Trump in two separate cases, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Smith wanted to testify publicly, but Republican representatives insisted on closed-door proceedings.

 

The subject of Smith’s testimony

Why would Republicans balk at the prospect of public hearings? Possibly because Democratic members will also be able to question Smith about the Trump prosecutions. At least some of that information is public, and Smith will be able to discuss it. There were reports that his lawyers previously requested guidance from DOJ on how he should answer questions about non-public materials, a standard practice for former DOJ employees who speak publicly on matters they handled during their employment. That could be uncomfortable for the president and awkward for members of his party if done publicly.

Smith dismissed the cases against Trump in November 2024, following his election, because DOJ policy prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president. One case involved allegations that Trump illegally possessed classified material at his Mar-a-Lago home. The other involved charges related to January 6.

Why do Republicans want to hear from Smith?

Smith, of course, is under investigation by Republicans for his work as special counsel, part of Representative Jim Jordan’s Trump-aligned push to claim that Joe Biden weaponized the Department of Justice. In October, Senate Republicans announced that as part of the January 6 investigation, prosecutors used court orders to obtain the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers: Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Representative Mike Kelly was also on the list. The Pennsylvania Republican’s name came up because Senator Johnson had publicly identified him as the source of the fake slate of electors that there was an attempt to pass to Vice President Pence, a claim Kelly denied.

The House initiated its effort to get Smith to testify shortly after the disclosure that these records were collected during the investigation.

Investigators working with Smith used grand jury subpoenas to obtain the phone records. That’s an entirely lawful and properly documented process. There is nothing nefarious about this—it would have been prosecutorial misconduct not to get phone records, because there was publicly available evidence suggesting the Trump/Giuliani camp had reached out to these elected officials about blocking certification of the election on January 6. Investigators sought records that could show if a phone call from a number associated with Trump or Giuliani had been made to these people during the relevant time. These records would only show whether a call had been placed and, if it was answered, how long the call lasted. That’s all. This wasn’t a wiretap.

This is a standard way of collecting information during an investigation. Members of Congress’ phone records were requested just like anyone else’s could be—not with an intent to prosecute, and in fact, none of them were ever changed—but with an intent to learn the truth about what happened so prosecutors could assess whether crimes had been committed and, if so, what further investigation was appropriate. Members of Congress don’t have immunity from criminal prosecution, but phone records also routinely reveal witnesses and victims of a crime, essential information for prosecutors to compile during an investigation. In this investigation, developing witnesses who could talk about what the White House asked them to do at this critical juncture was essential.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is an example of the basis investigators had for believing they needed to learn more about possible contacts. Tuberville was a newly minted Senator on January 6, fresh off the ballot and onto the floor of the Senate. He said publicly that he spoke with Donald Trump that afternoon. CNN reported the call was for “less than ten minutes.” Trump’s defense team denied the call happened. But Utah Senator Mike Lee’s office said Trump had accidentally called his phone, which he carried over to Tuberville so he could talk with the president. It would have been irresponsible under the circumstances not to check to see what other calls were placed to Tuberville.

Jack Smith’s team used subpoenas to collect evidence and also to develop investigative leads and witnesses.

House Republicans want more (but so do Democrats)

There was news today that Republican House Judiciary Committee members also want to take the testimony of four current and former Department of Justice officials who worked on or with Jack Smith, and who the Trump administration believes were involved in efforts to obtain the phone records. They include:

·        Raymond Hulser, one of Smith’s top deputies, was fired by the Trump administration in February after 34 years of service prosecuting public corruption cases.

·        Kenneth Polite, the first Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division during the Biden administration. Polite left before the end of the administration.

·        Timothy Duree, an attorney from DOJ’s fraud section who joined Jack Smith’s team and was fired by the Trump administration in January.

·        Molly Gaston, another DOJ lawyer who went over to Smith’s team. Gaston served as a prosecutor for almost 10 years and was highly regarded for her public corruption work. Gaston, too, was fired by the Trump administration.

“We believe you possess information vital to our constitutional oversight responsibilities,” House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan wrote to each of the four, according to a report from CNN. No word on whether the four will agree to interviews or wait for subpoenas. Presumably, Republicans have no more incentive to permit these witnesses to testify publicly than they do with Smith.

But the Committee’s Republicans aren’t the only ones after information. Democrats want DOJ to release part two of Smith’s final report on the Mar-a-Lago case, which remains under seal. According to House Democrats, that report “details how Donald Trump knowingly retained hundreds of presidential and highly classified records at his Mar-a-Lago club and then deliberately defied subpoenas, obstructed law enforcement, hid evidence, and lied about his continuing retention of these records.”

The lawsuit to release the report is still pending in the Southern District of Florida before Judge Aileen Cannon. House Democrats filed an amicus brief in that case and wrote to Attorney General Bondi, demanding that she release the report before Smith testified, so it would be fair game. “This Administration has repeatedly boasted that President Trump is ‘the most transparent and accessible president in American history.’ Your campaign to bury Mr. Smith’s report makes a joke out of that claim,” they said to her. “You are permitting prosecutors to be hauled before Congress to defend their work while denying Congress and the American public the written record that would explain it.”

Judge Cannon has been dragging her feet on ruling on the release since January. American Oversight, a bipartisan group that works to expose misconduct and hold government accountable, filed a petition for mandamus, asking that Judge Cannon be ordered to rule. The Eleventh Circuit, in a rare move, granted that request in November and gave the Judge 60 days to get it done, finding she had engaged in “undue delay.” Expect Judge Cannon to take virtually all of those 60 days before she rules, although perhaps Trump’s lawyers, at least those of them who haven’t joined his new administration, will seek further delay.

 

The Trump administration is trying to cast doubt on the Mar-a-Lago case

Ahead of the hearing, the administration appeared to take a stab at delegitimizing Smith’s work. Fox News ran a story Tuesday headlined, “FBI doubted probable cause for Mar-a-Lago raid but pushed forward amid pressure from Biden DOJ, emails reveal.” In a story they labeled as an “EXCLUSIVE,” they reported, “The FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, but moved forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department, with an official saying he didn’t ‘give a damn about the optics’ of the search, newly declassified documents reviewed by Fox News Digital reveal.” The story claims that an “email revealed that the FBI’s Washington Field Office did ‘not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.’”

Some of the documents uncovered during the search at Mar-a-Lago

MAGA Twitter exploded with claims like this one:

“IT’S OFFICIAL: A bombshell memo was just dispatched to Congress finding the Biden FBI DID NOT find PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, but prosecutors did it anyway.

CONSEQUENCES are needed.

This is an unprecedented miscarriage of justice.”

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt retweeted the story.

 

But even Judge Cannon rejected any notion that some dissent within the ranks at the FBI invalidated the probable cause used to obtain the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. While the case was in progress, Trump’s lawyers asked for a Franks hearing, a process for challenging the truthfulness of statements made by an agent in the affidavit used to obtain a search warrant. If a defendant succeeds in a Franks hearing, he can ask the judge to exclude any evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches. But Cannon didn’t find in Trump’s favor in this instance, finding that there was sufficient probable cause for the search warrant despite any dissent in the FBI ranks. Cannon held that considering dissenting views by FBI agents would not have “altered the evidentiary calculus in support of probable cause,” a remarkable ruling from a Judge who leaned strongly in Trump’s favor throughout.

 

And, of course, the results of the search, which revealed boxes full of classified documents, confirmed that prosecutors got it right.

Moreover, reporter Carol Leonnig, who wrote about these events in her recent book, INJUSTICE, posted on social media that the Fox News report got it wrong. Leonnig posted that the Fox News report was “misleading” because “Senior @FBI officials agreed there was ample probable cause before the Aug 2022 raid - incl videotapes showing Trump aides had secretly moved boxes of government records out of storage room.” She posted a page from the book that explained her assessment.

 

There are people who are interested in discrediting Smith and his investigation, and intimidating his coworkers, before he even gets started with his closed-door testimony in the morning. But the prosecutors involved aren’t people who back down. They are people who believe in proceeding against the powerful without fear or favor—that’s what public corruption prosecutors do. They don’t care, as this administration does, about whether a target is a friend or a foe of the president; their commitment is to doing justice. The administration can fire Jack Smith and his team, it can harass them, but there are still heroes who believe in doing the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons. Tomorrow, Smith goes up against House Republicans. We won’t be able to watch the proceedings because those members of Congress are afraid to let us see them. But there is more to come. This may well be a case of “Be careful what you ask for.” Jack Smith undoubtedly has a lot to say.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term

 

Photographer Christopher Anderson.

Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2)

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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.

 

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.

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.

 

“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.

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.

Bottom of Form

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.”

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.”

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.

Challenge coins, which are on various displays throughout the White House.

James Blair apparently wears many hats.

The staff entrance to the West Wing, away from the prying eyes of the press.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.”