Bulwark Takes - Sam Stein: No One Trashes Trump Like His Own Team

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Sam Stein joins Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace to discuss the stunning Vanity Fair interviews of Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles. Watch Deadline: White House on MSNOW: https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house

Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein. I'm here right after taping a segment on MS now and Nicole Wallace. We spent a lot of time talking about this explosive piece on White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, that came out this morning in Vanity Fair. If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out. It is two separate pieces built off of 11 separate interviews that Susie Wiles conducted, the author Chris Whipple, who has written the book on White House Chief. of staff. I'll let you watch the MS now clip with Nicole. I'm kind of curious for how you feel about what I said and also just sort of the piece in general. So please drop some comments in the feed. I'll take a look at them. What struck me about the reaction to the interview is just how perplexed everyone is. And we're not talking just about, you know, the Republicans. I mean, that we can spend a lot of time there. The general reaction from Republicans is why

did she do this? Why vanity fair? What was she possibly thinking? And all those are very valid questions. I actually don't really understand why she chose to do this. We're talking about someone who's incredibly reclusive. She doesn't do interviews. She never tweets. In fact, today in response to the vanity fair piece was, I believe, the first time she had posted an original tweet since October 31st, 2024. It's over a year. That's a lot of time. She just doesn't speak to the public. She did speak to Vanity Fair 11 separate times on the record.

And it's just a sort of curious decision, especially because this administration rarely works with non-Maga outlets, at least in this fashion. Part of me wonders if it's just because they like the alert of Vanity Fair and they really just wanted to get their photos done and look all glitzy and glamorous. And some of them think, well, Democrats get to have all the fun and be in Vanity Fair. why can't we do it? And so maybe they decided to sit down for that reason, which is kind of hilarious. But it's not just Republicans who are perplexed by this. I've been talking to some Democrats, too. Obviously, I think it's fair to say, they're fairly giddy with what Wiles said because she affirmed basically the most critical characterization of Trump you could possibly imagine, right? She called him sort of unencumbered narcissist, someone with an

Hall's personality. She more or less copped to the idea that there is political retribution happening. She described the Latisha James and James Comey cases, which are dormant right now, but could come back. She described them as politically motivated, just as if that were, of course, obvious when in reality that's both an absurd thing to admit and potentially legally damaging in a court of law. She talked about some of the most temple policy pursuits of the administration is failures. The terrorists, she criticized the impact on Doge, very critical of that. USAID, the cuts to that program, she thought was, you know, calamitous.

Some of the deportations, she was very critical of that. She went after cabinet members, right? She went after Pam Bondi. She went after J.D. Vance, both of them in the cabinet. Russ Vought, went after that guy, called him a zealot. Notable who wasn't actually in for criticism here, we can say that for another day. but she was very nice about Bobby Kennedy. Well, not that.

So anyways, Democrats are looking at this. You're like, what the heck is going on? Why would she do this? And a few of them I talked to today speculated that she is trying to cover her ass. That she's on her way out, wants the record to be shown, that she objected in real time to this administration,

and hopefully she can wash her hands of it. I don't know if I buy that. You don't give that many interviews over that long a period of time. if the goal here is for C.Y.A. You just don't. Because otherwise, you would do it once and get out the door. The other speculation is, is she trying to signal to some degree to Trump that he needs to pull back a little bit? Again, it just doesn't make sense if you're doing that many interviews over that many periods of time to try to send a signal to the boss. Besides, you could just do it in private. So what is she doing?

And why is she acting this way? I mean, my theory, as you'll see on MS now, well, I'll leave that for you to watch. But I talked to one really top Democratic operative about this. I didn't get his permission to go on the record, so I'm just going to use it on a background for now. He writes this, I think she looks at this at times and says, this is not smart, and this is why. The thing she doesn't say is, and if you do it, you'll do without me. There's always been this tension there, this person says of Wales. She's a rational actor working for a deranged person.

Maybe being the child of an alcoholic has conditioned her for this, try and stop destructive behavior, but if you can't facilitate it as best you can. I think I sort of agree with that, that she's trying to facilitate something. I think where I disagree is that she might find the behavior destructive, but she doesn't view it as her job to stop it. She views her job as someone who needs to execute on orders. So that's the point I made during my MS now appearance. Hope you enjoy it.

And like I said, give me your feedback in the comments. I'll take a look. Appreciate you tuning into Bulwark Takes. Subscribe to the feed and we'll catch you later. We're back with Miles, Sam and Andrew. So Sam, Trump gave him, frankly, an answer I don't understand. He seemed to defend Susie Wiles by talking about not drinking alcohol. So again, I don't have a skill set to decipher that.

But so far, he's standing by his woman. Yeah, I'm not going to speculate like Andrew on the psychology of the decision for the interview. I will note that she gave 11 interviews over the course of what appears to be many months. So if this was a cry for help, it was a fairly long cry for help. What's striking to me here, though, is it's such an indictment of both Trump and his administration that if it were to come from, you know, anyone else's mouth, they would have accused of having Trump derangement syndrome, right? It's, you know, J.D. Vance is an opportunist and a conspiracy theorist.

Pam Bonney is ineffectual. Donald Trump as an alcoholic personality. Elon Musk as a ketamine abuser. And not just that. It's the policies, too, right? I mean, they go after the administration for mishandling. She goes after the administration for mishandling the Epstein files for the U.S. aid cuts down the line.

She says Trump is in the Epstein files. I mean, she says Trump is in them. She says Pam Bondi whiffed. I mean, she ends all of the sort of mysteries in the, Washington. You know, J.D. Vance is a phony, a fraud, who's just there for the political expedience of being there because he had to win a Senate seat. Russ, vote is a zealot, something that I've had some of the harshest critics of Project 2025. They've never described him as a zealot. Donald Trump has a, quote, alcoholics personality, something that I don't have the expertise

to describe, but that's her assessment. I mean, she gives the, to your point, the harshest rebuke of Donald Trump always comes from the people who see him up close every day. Exactly. And so I guess I disagree ever so slightly with Miles on this one. I think she's on for the ride. I think she views the role of her role at least as someone who can actually implement to the most efficient degree possible, Trump's vision. She's not someone who's going to stand in the way and say, no, these are bad impulses or this is wrong policy or even this may be unconstitutional. She views, I believe, her job as someone who says you are the boss, you're the president, and I am here to implement your orders. And the fact that

she went out and publicly disagreed with him doesn't necessarily pose any contradiction to that worldview because her job is not to impose her worldview on Donald Trump, it's, to implement his. I mean, Sam, that's really interesting because in some ways that's the ultimate humiliation. We now know that Susie Wiles knows, that she's working for someone who, and she tells Chris Whipple that she knows this because of her father. And again, I don't have the training to analyze any of this, but this is just what Susie Wiles said to the journalist. And she's tied herself, and I agree with you. I think she's his lieutenant, you know, sir, yes, sir. But she's carrying out orders for someone she describes as having a, quote, alcoholics personality. Like, imagine if you were working for

administration, and you just fundamentally thought that the cuts they made to foreign aid were immoral and wrong. And you thought that they completely botched the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. And then you thought that, you know, the way that they were implementing the doge cuts was a wrecking ball, right? And then on top of that, you thought the attorney general is not doing a good job. And the vice president was a conspiracy theorist and so on and so forth. And down the line, the terrorists weren't actually working and implementing, like they said, Kim Mara Obrigo Garcia was deported wrongly and so on and so forth. At some point, you'd say, know what, I've had enough, right? Like, this is just too much. I don't want to be part of this.

I'm not comfortable here. I find these people creepy and immoral. But not Susie Wiles. Susie Wiles has said all these things. We know she said it's on record. But she views her job as simply sucking it up and putting Trump's agenda into place. I don't think I could do something like that, but she can. And it does say a lot about the composition of Trump's second team versus his first.