If you spot it, you got it

Donald Trump might not drink, but that doesn't mean he is immune to displaying certain behaviours. Charlotte Cripps, having been through alcohol addiction, sees the similarities

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An explosive tell-all interview in Vanity Fair with Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, reveals her experience of what US president Donald Trump and his inner circle are really like behind closed doors in Washington DC.

In the piece published on Tuesday, Wiles declared that JD Vance had been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade”, and that Elon Musk is an “odd, odd duck” and an “avowed ketamine [user]” who “sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building]”. But the big hitter? Trump, who is famously teetotal, has an “alcoholic’s personality” because he believes “there’s nothing he can’t do”.

Wiles has since distanced herself from the interview in a post on X/Twitter, calling it “a disingenuously framed hit piece” - while the Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple, who met with Wiles 11 times over 11 months, has responded that “everything is on tape”. One thing is clear, however: Wiles, 68, who played a key part in Trump’s successful 2024 presidential campaign before becoming the first female White House chief of staff, is in a position to label Trump as having an “alcoholic’s personality” - as am I.

As she explains in the interview, her own father, the legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, was an alcoholic who attended the Betty Ford Clinic in 1992 - and it makes her “a little bit of an expert in big personalities”. As Wiles put it: Trump “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”