Wiles dismissed Vanity Fair’s work as a “hit piece,” and a number of Cabinet officials and other aides rushed to her defense. But Wiles notably has not denied any details or quotes.
Here are some takeaways from Wiles’ interview:
Wiles described Trump as an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often unconcerned about process and policy details.
“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,” she said.
Said Wiles: “I’m not an enabler. … I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles said early in Trump’s second administration, telling Vanity Fair she did try to tamp down Trump’s penchant for retribution.
But in August 2025, she shifted. “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said, arguing Trump has a different principle: “‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’”
Still, she said, “there may be an element of that from time to time” and Trump “will go for it … when there’s an opportunity.”
“Who would blame him?” she asked rhetorically. “Not me.”
Wiles also said Trump pushed false narratives that former President Bill Clinton frequented Epstein’s infamous island. “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles, and there are no damning findings concerning Clinton at all.
“The president was wrong about that,” Wiles said.
Wiles often sits to the side in the Oval Office, out of camera view. But she’s paying attention.
“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,” she said, adding that “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
But in praising Kennedy, Wiles explained her embrace of the administration’s hard-liners: “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.”
Wiles called the April rollout “so much thinking out loud” and said there were internal disputes about it among Trump’s aides. She said she told aides to “work into what he’s already thinking” and asked Vance to tell Trump to “not talk about tariffs today” until his team was “in complete unity.”
Trump proceeded on his own.
Wiles said she believed a middle ground on tariffs would be successful. But, she concluded, “It’s been more painful than I expected.”
When a federal judge chided the administration for deporting Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Trump publicly defended the approach despite the administration telling the court it was a mistake. Wiles did not mince words, telling Vanity Fair at the time, “We’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation.”
When the administration deported two mothers and their U.S. citizen children, including one who was a cancer patient, Wiles was even more plainspoken: “It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know. I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
“I actually think that President Putin wants to see it end,” Trump told reporters Monday.
But Wiles offered deep skepticism to Vanity Fair about Putin.
“The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles said in August, referring to the oblast that is a key part of Donbas.
“Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told her interviewer.
Wiles said in November that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
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Associated Press reporters Aamer Madhani and Josh Boak contributed from Washington.
