What’s in the Trump White House Vanity Fair article

The last time a top Trump advisor revealed a bit too much during an on-the-record interview, that advisor not only got immediately fired, but his surname (Scaramucci) became the metric by which the tenures of all future Trump officials would be measured.

So if we hereby calculate that one Scaramucci equals 11 days, then President Trump’s current chief of staff Susie Wiles lasted exactly 30 Scaramuccis before Vanity Fair dropped a bombshell piece based on her months of on-the-record chats throughout Trump 2.0.

And while it contains enough palace intrigue to keep DC frothing well into the 2060s (Wiles labels other key White House players zealots, conspiracy theorists, and ketamine-junkies), she also reveals plenty about Trump’s approach to our wider world.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

1. Venezuela 

It’s interesting how much Wiles uses Venezuela — from start to finish — as a distilled case study of Trump’s broader foreign policy. It makes a bit of sense: while both Putin and Hamas pulled their latest triggers before Trump’s return, Maduro has been in the palace since 2013, and ruling by decree since 2015 — so this latest escalation is more on Trump.

That’s why this one phrase from Wiles is so revealing: she says Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” Ie, in one breath she confirms two things we’ve long flagged: first, that the counter-narcotics framing is just a fig-leaf to oust Maduro. And second, like it or not, it might work (Maduro has been haggling over exile terms since at least early November).

And in the Americas at least, this all hints at Trump’s preference for 1) coercion over containment, 2) unilateral action over multilateral pressure, and 3) personal dominance over institutional strategy. Legal, humanitarian, or regional fallout? Wiles won’t blink.

2. Russia and Ukraine 

This is where Wiles gets wild — there’s little in history to suggest giving Putin more of other people’s land is the solution. To the contrary, whether it’s Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), or broader Ukraine (2022), he’s denied and even derided fears he might invade, only to do it anyway before moving on to his next (bigger) objective.

Now almost as if on cue, Putin just gave another speech calling European leaders swine, and claiming he won’t end his war without Ukraine’s capitulation. Then enter Wiles with this: “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy.”

But before we can ponder which DC experts might believe let alone advise this, the Vanity Fair piece paraphrases Wiles as suggesting, “privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace.”

Now, a chief of staff’s job is to make their boss look good, but this Wiles framing is almost the opposite of how things appear: President Trump returned to power on claims his personal connection with the Russian despot would help prove the experts wrong.

As for that personal connection? Wiles gives an equivocal description: “very mixed.”

3. War and peace 

Now to conclude, presidents often use their second term to build a legacy abroad, so Wiles is on-brand when she tackles portrayals of Trump as a warmonger. To the contrary, Wiles says, “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing”.

To that end, much of the piece attributes any Trump wins to what a NYT op-ed has described as “cowboy diplomacy” — shatter taboos, greet pariahs, but get the deal done.

And yet one of the most interesting bits about this Wiles tell-all is how much she also reflects bluntly on the downsides of going full cowboy:

• On shutting-down rather than (say) reforming USAID? An aghast Wiles notes “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
• On the Liberation Day tariffs? Wiles says the on-again-off-again rollout was “thinking out loud”, and observes “it’s been more painful than I expected”, though it’s unclear if she means the economic, diplomatic, or political pain (or all three).

But it’s at this point that Wiles redirects things back to the home front, arguing “more talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for.” She adds that US voters “like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”

Intrigue’s Take

We often get (and appreciate!) feedback suggesting we focus too much on the US. And believe us — we didn’t get those sweet sweet diplomatic passports to focus only on the US.

But the reality is the US (or at least DC) is in the midst of a massive change with strategists everywhere now grappling daily with the implications. Just yesterday, a new DC think-piece gave voice to some of the allied whispers we’ve heard, warning bluntly that “it’s time to stop pretending the old order can be preserved and time to start working on Plan B.”

Some US allies are now even putting their own name to it, whether it’s Germany’s Merz casually declaring Pax Americana now over, or Finland’s Stubb penning an entire essay fleshing out how the West’s Plan B might even look: stick to core principles, reform key institutions, while pragmatically partnering with the Global South.

So all that to say… it’s hard to think of a bigger question right now than what’s shaping US strategy. And it’s hard to think of a better source on that than the US president’s own chief of staff, even if she’s pivoting between legacy-polish and grenade-throw.

Sound even smarter:

• Months after USAID’s demise, a live tracker out of BU suggests 150,000 people have now already died as a result, and that’s just from a single program (PEPFAR).
• Wiles has dismissed the (on-the-record) Vanity Fair article as a hit piece, and key administration powerbrokers are reiterating their support for the chief of staff.