There are no wallflowers in Trump’s White House
 | By Frank Bruni |
Vice President JD Vance is “a conspiracy theorist.” Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, isn’t merely a zealot; he’s a “right-wing absolute zealot.” And President Trump governs with an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Ever since the publication last week of a two-part article in Vanity Fair in which Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said all of that and more, political observers have been asking: Why did she do it? Why discard her usual discretion and speak so frankly, on the record, about her cracked compatriots in the Trump administration?
It’s a great question, but it’s not the most important one, which is this: Why does she do it? I’m referring not to the interview but to her job. If she can see the incoherence, immoderation and instability all around her, why abet it?
To both questions, the answer — or at least one of the answers — is surely the same. Wiles has been given a plum part in history (not to mention a history-making part, in that she’s the first woman in her role). She relishes that, enough to want recognition, enough to consent to 11 interviews with the journalist Chris Whipple, enough to position herself during those conversations as the even-keeled sage appraising everyone around her. How fitting that Whipple’s portrait of her appeared in a publication named Vanity Fair.
“I don’t ever seek attention,” she told Whipple at one point, a statement that’s a laugh line, though it’s unclear whether Whipple saw it that way and it’s obvious that Wiles didn’t. I repeat: 11 interviews. Over the course of nearly a year. She spoke to Whipple on Sundays, after going to church. She spoke to him while she was doing laundry. She left an Oval Office meeting early to go speak with him. The Garbo of the West Wing, she’s not.
The first year of Trump’s return to the White House has shown or reminded us of many things, including the fragility of democracy, the prevalence of cowardice and the intensity of tribalism. But it has been an especially stark and galling education in the intoxication of power.
And Wiles is a more illuminating entry on that syllabus than other senior administration officials, who wear their vainglory so conspicuously it might as well be a sandwich board spelling out their attachment to their entourages, to their letterheads, to the pomp and the perks. Many of them — Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel — lack the credentials to be given anything remotely resembling such high-ranking jobs by anyone other than a destructionist like Trump, and they’re surely too thrilled by their outrageous fortune to gaze skeptically at any uncomely aspect of it. Besides which, those three, along with other presidential aides and advisers, are as rapacious, reckless and altogether rotten as Trump.
But Wiles is different. She’s a seasoned political pro who has often, relative to others in her line of work, kept to the background. She doesn’t take to social media to advertise her every brain spasm as some eureka insight and raptly monitor the odometer of likes and shares. She had prominent political assignments before Trump and could have significant political roles independent of him. And she has never come across as an ardent ideologue, so dedicated to certain policy aims that all manner of compromise in their service would be OK.
But when Trump beckoned her to join him as he returned to the White House, she came. She came despite her awareness of how quickly he’d cycled through chiefs of staff and other senior aides during his previous term. She came despite knowing — as does any sensate creature even casually observing America over the past decade — how vicious and volatile he can be. She came with eyes open to his biases, having worked on all three of his presidential campaigns. Briefing Whipple on Trump’s tropisms, she observed: “He’s said it a million times — ‘I judge people by their genes.’” That nugget drew less notice than the digs at Vance and Vought. But it’s a doozy, especially given Trump’s frequent rants about immigration and I.Q.
Whipple’s portrait of her suggests that she is in many ways ideologically simpatico with Trump and genuinely believes that he has done good. She acknowledges excesses and sloppiness — regarding tariffs, deportations and more — but says that sometimes, to restore balance, you must yank things hard in the direction opposite from where they stand. She seems to hold some cabinet members in high regard; her favorites inexplicably include Kennedy, whom she refers to as “my Bobby.” The “my” fascinates. Like posing for glamour shots in a celebrity-centric magazine, it challenges her reputation for self-effacement.
But that sort of reputation can be as deliberate as any other. To be known as the humble deckhand who steadies an otherwise rocky ship is nonetheless to be known; to be seen as someone who doesn’t insist on getting credit is to get an especially flattering kind of credit. She described for Whipple how she sits far to the side during televised Oval Office gatherings, so she’s off camera. But isn’t she edging her way back into the shot by telling Whipple that?
Wiles is certainly no Hegseth, showily doing push-ups with the troops; no Patel, with his premature expectorations; no Kristi Noem, zipping down to El Salvador for a macabre photo op. But she’s also human, with an itch to make sure that her presence and her sway at the pinnacle of power don’t go unnoticed, unrecorded, underappreciated.
Even someone like Wiles savors the air up there. Even if it’s toxic with conspiracy theories and zealotry.
