As chief of staff, she has stifled her temptation to intervene time and time again
Susie Wiles has the gimlet eye of an alcoholic’s daughter. She is always on edge, vigilant to the slightest movement, fearful of sudden danger, and has learned to withdraw herself from the chaos in order to survive. She is keenly observant, sees through people around her who are not drinkers to decipher their underlying motives that might flare into unexpected menace, and practiced in passive aggression of which her interview with Vanity Fair is a classic case study.
Wiles defines herself as the child of a raging drunk and it is through that singular lens of her formative experience that she defines her current boss. “I make a specialty of it,” she told the writer Christopher Whipple for his Vanity Fair profile of the Trump White House chief of staff in one of the eleven interviews she granted him. Donald Trump, she stated, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” though he does not drink. She didn’t stop there, but elaborated that “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.” Trump, she said, “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” reveals Wiles’ personal understanding about a megalomaniacal celebrity who fosters pandemonium around himself without any care for others. Her father, Pat Summerall, the great football placekicker and the play-by-play broadcaster of National Football League games on CBS for 40 years, was the original bad daddy. “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she said. She remembered him as a mostly absentee father and so drunk he “wouldn’t recognize” his granddaughter, which Wiles thought “horrifying.” Alcoholism, she said, is a “disease that clouds your judgment,” and no one, however smart they think they are can “out think addiction.” In 1992, Wiles and her mother staged an intervention to take him to the Betty Ford Drug Rehab Center. She gave him a letter reading, “Dad, the few times we’ve been out in public together recently, I’ve been ashamed we shared the same last name.” That is what she means when she says someone has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
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