Our bespoke piñata of the day is the Susie Wiles piece in Vanity Fair (they must be excited to move on from Olivia …) We’re seeing the standard incantations of “fake news” from none other than Wiles herself. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries have all lined up to post tweets repeating the claim, intoning the Trump-Wiles catechism as though they’d just emerged from a fast-forward struggle session with a pack of feral MAGA toughs. I’ve started making my way through the morselly excerpts, as perhaps you have or are too. What struck me here was perhaps not even so much the quotes as the venue.
Few American publications are more at the heart of the cosmopolitan world of America than Vanity Fair. That is not liberal. Small-c cosmopolitan is different but overlapping. But it is perhaps even more than “liberal” what MAGA is talking about when it denounces the “coastal elite.” Certainly they’re talking more about that than, like, People for the American Way or Americans for Democratic Action or Heather Cox Richardson. Susie Wiles is no fool. And while she may — as in a very low de minimis chance — have gotten a touch injudicious in a few quotes, she certainly knew with perfect clarity what Vanity Fair is.
And this makes me wonder a few things. The rallying around the flag has been rapid and total. Just goddamn absolute. Perhaps we’ll see some hemorrhaging over the coming days. But I doubt it. And to me that means that Wiles has total confidence in her position, either because her hold over Trump is that secure (which I think it is) or that it is secure in part because of his increasingly clear enervation (which I think is at least part of the equation.)
To make clear what I mean, there’s the channel of her personal security, which there’s every reason to believe is very, very strong. And there’s Trump’s personal enervation, the slow loss of coherence and synaptic fragmentation we see both in his personal conduct and in the slackening reins of power around him.
To illustrate the first channel, it’s difficult to overstate how important Wiles is for Trump. Do you remember the last Susie Wiles drama or death watch? No. Because it’s simply never happened. No one ever stays long with Trump, but she goes way back into his period in exile as his indispensable person. (She worked for Trump in less central positions going back to 2015.) I suspect she was a big part of the relative stability of his reelection campaign and whatever counts as that stability relative to however crazier things might have been without her. I’m not saying anything new. This is a throughline in almost all the reporting on Trump since his darkest (for him) days after 2021. In a way, she became the person who could make the trains of chaos run on time. I think it is mostly that, or largely that. But I also don’t think we can separate it from that process of enervation we all see before our eyes.
But note also the other big element in these quotes released by the Vanity Fair PR machine.
If I’m not mistaken, Wiles seems to have tried to warn Trump off of his wildest and most malevolent actions. She tried. And she wants us to know she tried. Indeed, the second point is probably more certain and significant than the first. But he decided to do them anyway. And that’s fine. Because he’s the boss. But no one else but Wiles seems to have these rights written into her deal. She can tell us all about it, tell us the things all of us know but from within the MAGA politburo and on the record. She’s no Beria. She’s no Malenkov. She’s untouchable. Or at least that’s what it looks like right now. This whole thing seems like if not a declaration of independence than one of untouchability on her behalf. Trump’s my bitch. I can touch the MAGA third rail and suffer no harm.
