I considered this objection before writing my hypothesis post.
This White House leaks. Susie didn’t want frenemies like JD Vance calling the New York Post to say why she walked out a top level meeting. I could be wrong, but that’s my idea.
My own two cents on the Trump 4D chess thing…
The last thing that Trump will ever be is subtle. He doesn’t do subtlety. He doesn’t just lie, he brays like an ass. Loudly, repeatedly, with his chest stuck out. He’s challenging you to call him on his bullshit, if you do then you’re questioning his authority. He cows people. It’s his default way of interacting with anyone else. That or tactical obsequiousness to try and set up an advantage down the road.
Was the Vanity Fair article planned? Was it a ham handed attempt at a distraction that backfired slightly? Followed up by another ham handed attempt to tell the country to “look over there!” Certainly I think all these things can be true. They would much rather we be talking about these interviews rather than Epstein or an impending war with Venezuela. I’m sure he knows enough at least to understand the concept of a media distraction. But he always has to be the alpha male. He is always betrayed by his ego and constant need for attention.
The reason why this is an apples and oranges situation, is that Trump “leaked” things that he wanted people to think about him. He wanted to spread rumors that made him look like a free-wheeling ladies’ man. Things that were (in his mind at least) salacious and newsworthy, but not in a way that hurt his reputation in a manner that he cared about.
In contrast, those interviews did not make Donald Trump look good. If he intended her to give interviews to leak things that would be a benefit to him, which is what he did in the past, somebody screwed something up. Either he didn’t convey what she was supposed to say very well, or she went off-script, but either way it seems pretty negative.
It would be “4D chess” if it turns out that everyone else is wrong, that somehow this ultimately ends up being a positive for Trump, and everyone’s reactions to it now are shortsighted for the genius long game. And that’s what people are casting doubt on. Either Trump had no part of this, or it’s intentional and he blundered. The fact that the White House is scrambling to provide damage control is evidence that if this was a planned thing, it clearly did not turn out how they wanted it to.
Lots of officials are somewhat vain and have succumbed to the idea of national pictorials and interviews.
I think Trump does what Trump always does. This isn’t about multidimensional chess, and if it was Wiles and not Trump would be playing it.
There is an element of distraction to this, and Trump is likely amused someone who likes talks slight shade. Nothing in the interview is very damaging, some of it distracts. Probably Wiles does regret the comments about Musk but not USAID, and I don’t know what to make about Clinton. Wiles did not mention Biden that I know of. If Wiles felt guilty or complicit, that doesn’t come across - but the loyalty still does, mostly.
Bear with me while I talk about Graydon Carter.
A Canadian outsider, he was stunned by the self-hyping megalomania of NYC. He co-founded one of the great magazines of our time, Spy, to relentlessly mock celebrities and the new rich. Trump was a favorite target, who HATED the epithet “short-fingered vulgarian” they always appended to his name.
In 1992, Sam Newhouse of Condé Nast approached him to take over the reborn Vanity Fair magazine from Tina Brown (who refused to run a cover of Marla Maples). Carter abandoned most of his principles to run a hugely profitable magazine that started with 150 pages of glossy ads and glossier portraits of celebrities every issue, working his way into the center of NYC’s inner-most circle with every big name in America eager to take his calls. He was the magazine version of Lorne Michaels, a Canadian outsider who saw an opportunity to overturn all the rules of comedy with SNL, and worked his way into to center of NYC’s inner-most circle by losing all the rebellion of his youth but gaining the ability to get everyone in America to take his calls. (The parallels between them are uncanny. If you read Carter’s recent autobiography and the recent biography of Michaels they seem like the same person in different multiverses.)
Carter used the floods of Vanity Fair money to pay the highest prices for good long-form journalism in the industry. (Higher even than sister magazine The New Yorker, which Carter was slated to edit before Condé Nast double-crossed him by transferring Tina Brown there, and gave him VF as a consolation prize. It was personal.) They exposed high-level crooks and shady political dealings. At the back of the magazine, after the portraits of beautiful people in beautiful rooms at beautiful mansions. Trump did not fit into those categories. He tried to make peace and Ivanka made the cover in 1992 (might have been a last Brown issue) and Marla and Donald in 1994. (Michaels also had Trump as a host. Twice. He was the ne plus ultra of NYC assholes so the ins could make fun of him while the outs laughed with him.) Yet Carter kept noodging away at him. For decades. Melania never made the cover. VF was as liberal as The New Yorker. Trump was the embodiment of the enemy.
Carter retired in 2017 because that era was over. VF is a shell of itself these days, as all print magazines are. Nevertheless, a sizable segment of the beautiful elite remains its target audience. I can totally believe that when they approached Wiles, Trump was ecstatic. A chance to shove it down his mocker’s throat. He knew he couldn’t pressure them into a Donald and Melania cover, but this was the next best thing. I’m sure that Wiles didn’t particularly want to lift the curtain: her not being a media figure was much of her power. Trump undoubtedly encouraged her to do it anyway and cooperate with every last thing they asked. And he told the rest of his toadies the same thing.
Which is why I also believe this is very, very wrong.
Vance couldn’t and wouldn’t “tattle” on something Trump badly wanted. What his ego didn’t foresee was the magazine’s decision to use all the negative Wiles quotes surrounding the few positive ones. To think that he planned the article as some sort of sleeper cell is ludicrous. If he did he was truly hoist by his own petard.
Trump never forgets a grudge. And grudges never forget him.
I think you could have dispensed with the intensifiers (“very, very”), but I’ll withdraw that part of the speculation. It is hard to know what was said in the ten seconds before Wiles left the Oval to talk with Whipple, other than that Susie’s story is a partial or complete lie.
And I think you are agreeing with me on why Wiles sat (or stood up doing laundry) for eleven long interviews.
Another speculation: Whipple did not interview Wiles for maybe 20 hours just for one two-part article. A book is coming.
I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch; it seems like everybody writes a book these days. And given the attention this has gotten so far already, somebody is probably scrambling to strike while the iron is hot and capitalize on it.
A few months ago, Terry Gross interviewed the author of a book about Conde Nast during its glory days in the 1980s. The editors had Town Cars on call to take them anywhere they needed to go, they flew first class all the time and many had clothing allowances in the tens of thousands.
Agreeing with this?
Soaking of, Ms. Gross also interviewed the author of this Vanity Fair article.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/18/nx-s1-5647529/a-revealing-profile-of-trump-chief-of-staff-susie-wiles
What the thread hasn’t noted yet are the pictures that accompanied the article. There has been a lot of online chatter about how unflattering the photos are, and how the photographers subtly insulted their subjects.
Here’s a sampling
Here’s JD looking small next to a light switch
A lot of people have noted the filler lines on her lips
Others have compared their photo of Stephen Miller to a notorious picture of Hermann Goering.
This is my personal favorite
If you told me that was supposed to be a woman in her 20s I’d ask what was wrong with her. The photographer went out of their way to make Leavitt look rough. You shouldn’t be shooting for a Mar-a-Lago face when you’re in your twenties.
No, agreeing that Trump told Wiles (and other administration officials) to cooperate with Vanity Fair.
Your detailed explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for that.
Interview with photographer Christopher Anderson.
I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
You’re welcome. Took me a bit to put it all together in my head, but when it did I think it’s a tight fit.
I don’t know why, but this bit gave me the chills slightly.
@Exapno_Mapcase Awesome. Thank you. Haven’t thought of this for at least a decade but you sparked a memory on Graydon
I can’t find a link to the article, and maybe it was print only from ~20 years ago by William Cash titled “Inside the Vanity Fair Inner Circle”. And the author and title could be wrong but AI search engines can’t find it. Anyhoo, the author was a low-level English Vanity Fair staffer in New York, who was an admitted alcoholic at the time, and he got Graydon to go do a full “London is now it” piece. And during the London research, lectured Graydon using Graydon’s standard lecture of how “you think you’re in the inner circle, you’re not and you don’t know shit.” The author recounts interaction with another low level staffer that he shared a closet sized office, and they threw around the term “the BOMB” and other juvenile stuff. And in that same article recounts how he gave up the booze and won the girl in the end.
Back to this thread, Trump is in the camp of “no publicity is bad publicity.” Just flood the zone, dominate the airways, “look squirrel”
This is the same guy who willingly sat for interviews with Bob Woodward, and then was upset (and, somehow, apparently, surprised) when Woodward’s book portrayed him as less than amazing.
Maybe it’s a consequence of surrounding himself with enablers and toadies. Everyone has to agree with him and any pushback or criticism, you’re out. He has an assistant whose job is to find articles favorable to him online and print them out so he can read them and soothe his delicate ego.
On the other hand, as much as he hates the media with their “fake news” always trying to persecute him, I don’t know why he thought Vanity Fair wouldn’t dare print anything negative from an interview. Maybe someone gave him the idea that they’d act as propaganda like OANN.
That there is Goebbels.
I can’t place the article and I don’t remember anything similar in Carter’s book. But read anything about the magazine business in its heyday and you’ll get your fill of editors enabling reporters to spend money, booze it up, and return with nothing after weeks or months in the field. See also Hunter S. Thompson.