Trump chief of staff says he has ‘alcoholic’s personality’

Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has given a brutal review of the president in a major new interview, saying he has an “alcoholic’s personality”.

- KELLY RISSMAN IN NEW YORK

In a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, Ms Wiles described how she landed her role and what it's like to be arguably the closest person to the president. In that position, she has come to know the 79-year-old extremely well. Mr Trump is a teetotaler, but she described him as having an “alcoholic’s personality”.

He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she told the magazine. This personality type is something she became familiar with as a child, living with an alcoholic father, Ms Wiles said. After the article was published, Ms Wiles branded it a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff and cabinet in history”.

Ms Wiles’ father was Pat Summerall, a former NFL player turned broadcaster who was known as “the voice of football”. For all his achievements, he was also an absentee father and an alcoholic; Ms Wiles assisted her mother in staging interventions for him, she told the magazine. Summerall died at age 82 in 2013 and was sober for 21 years before his death.

Still, Ms Wiles said: “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me.” She told Vanity Fair in the article: “Some clinical psychologist that knows 1 million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But 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.”