Susie Wiles is not a woman known for loose talk. As Donald Trump’s chief of staff, she is widely seen as the adult in the room — the gatekeeper, the fixer, the person closest to the president who is still capable of saying no. That’s what makes her comments in a bombshell new Vanity Fair interview land with such force.
In the wide-ranging profile, Wiles delivers a withering psychological portrait of the 79-year-old president, describing Trump — a lifelong teetotaler — as having what she calls an “alcoholic’s personality.”
“He operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” Wiles told the magazine.
The comparison was not casual. It came from experience.
Jan 20, 2025; Washington, DC, USA; (L-R) Incoming White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles speaks with Miriam Adelson as they arrive for the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th US President in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.. Mandatory Credit: Saul Loeb-Pool via Imagn Images
Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father, the late Pat Summerall — the former NFL player and legendary broadcaster once known as the “voice of football.” While Summerall achieved enormous professional success, he was also an absentee parent whose drinking deeply affected his family. Wiles said she helped her mother stage interventions and lived firsthand with the fallout of addiction.
“Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she said.
Though Summerall sobered up more than two decades before his death in 2013 at age 82, the damage lingered. That history, Wiles suggested, gave her a particular sensitivity to certain personality traits — even in someone who never touches alcohol.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” she said. “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.”
Trump has long said he abstains from alcohol entirely, citing his older brother Fred Trump’s struggle with alcoholism. Fred Trump died in 1981 at just 41 years old. In a 2019 interview, Trump reflected on watching alcohol take a physical toll on his brother, saying it left a lasting impression on him.
That family history hovered in the background when Trump first met Wiles in 2015 at Trump Tower. According to Wiles, Trump was fixated on her lineage.
“He’s said it a million times,” she recalled. “‘I judge people by their genes.’”
At the time, Trump was still a real estate mogul turned long-shot presidential candidate. His campaign soon reached out to Wiles with a blunt pitch: Florida mattered, and they needed her.
“They called me one night and said, ‘We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?’” Wiles said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’”
The partnership nearly imploded in the fall of 2016. After seeing disappointing polling numbers, Trump unleashed his fury on Wiles at his Miami golf club — in front of his friends.
“It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles recalled. “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.”
Instead, she gave him an ultimatum.
“You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl,” she told him. “But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice.”
She walked out. Trump called her the next day — and the day after that.
That November, Trump narrowly carried Florida, winning 49 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 47.8 percent, a crucial victory that helped propel him to the White House. Wiles’ standing was sealed.
After the election, Trump encouraged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to hire her, and she helped guide DeSantis to a gubernatorial win in 2018. Their relationship later soured for reasons Wiles said she never fully understood — a break she now views as fate.
“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,” she said. “I might or might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.”
Instead, she returned to Trump’s orbit, running his 2020 campaign and ultimately becoming his chief of staff — close enough to see the president’s volatility, ambition, and boundless belief in himself up close.
In Wiles’ telling, Trump doesn’t need a drink to intoxicate a room. His personality, already exaggerated, does the work all on its own.
