Trump’s chief of staff says he believes ‘there’s nothing he can’t do’ as president

Donald Trump believes “there’s nothing he can’t do, nothing, zero” as US president, the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said in a rare interview that shines an unvarnished spotlight on his second administration.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Wiles described Trump – who is teetotal – as having “an alcoholic’s personality”, an insight she ascribed to her relationship with her late father, the broadcaster and NFL star Pat Summerall, who had alcoholism.

“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 in a series of 11 interviews she gave to the author Chris Whipple.

In a series of strikingly unguarded comments even before Trump returned to the presidency, Wiles said that Trump will pursue retribution against his political opponents when he sees an “opportunity” and said she forged a “loose agreement” with him to finish score-settling with adversaries by the first 90 days of his administration.

But the president did not stick to it. Indictments have been served more than six months into his presidency on the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who won a civil action against Trump for business fraud, and the former FBI director, James Comey, whom Trump fired during his first presidency.

“In some cases, it may look like retribution,” Wiles said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution,” she said of Trump. “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Wiles said she had warned Trump against pardoning all 1,500 rioters involved in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, when a mob trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the previous presidential election stormed the US Capitol.

She acknowledged that the FBI did “an incredible job” in establishing who was guilty of what – a declaration at odds with Trump’s pursuit of vengeance against agents who were instrumental in the investigation, several of whom have been fired.

“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,” she said.

But Trump argued – against evidence to the contrary – that even violent offenders had been given disproportionately heavy sentences, so she relented.

“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,” she said.

Wiles expressed strong misgivings about the personality and actions of the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who pioneered the unofficial department of government efficiency (Doge) dedicated to slashing bureaucracy, and was especially critical of its dismantling of USAID, the government overseas development body.

“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody,” she said, crediting the agency with “very good work”.

She called Musk “an odd, odd duck” and said she was “initially aghast” at his approach.

After the SpaceX and Tesla owner shared a social media post saying Stalin, Mao and Hitler did not murder millions, but that their public sector workers did, Wiles put it down to his drug use, saying: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” Asked to elaborate, she said: “He’s an avowed ketamine [user].”

Wiles also criticised Pam Bondi, the attorney general, for mishandling the Epstein files, relating to the disgraced late financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which has threatened to open a chasm between Trump and his Maga followers.

She acknowledged that Trump was in the files but, she said, “not [for] doing anything awful”.

Of Bondi, she said: “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this. First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

Trump, Bondi and Musk have not publicly responded to the Vanity Fair articles.

On Trump’s signature immigrant deportation scheme – which has drawn criticism for mass round ups of people who have not committed crimes, in contrast with pre-election promises to deport “the worst of the worst” – Wiles admitted disquiet, saying “we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation”.

While many of Trump’s cabinet picks – including the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary – have been criticised as unqualified, Wiles described them as “a world-class cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of”. She characterized them as “disrupters” tailor-made to tackle “the deep state”.

She called Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary criticised by opponents for embracing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby”, while praising him for shaking up the Department of Health and Human Services.

She appeared less complimentary about the vice president, JD Vance, whom she said has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and whose conversion from vehement anti-Trumper to Maga diehard she described as “sort of political”.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget – and a key architect of the Project 2025 blueprint that has guided much of Trump’s second presidency – she described as “an absolute rightwing zealot”.