MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: Asleep at the wheel

Is there anybody in charge at the White House?

In today’s letter: White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has a lot to say about the inner workings of Donald Trump’s team. What does she reveal about who’s actually in charge?

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THE GIST: The buck stops where?

Yesterday, Vanity Fair magazine published Chris Whipple’s long-in-the-works profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the low-profile manager who is arguably the second-most-powerful person in America. Whipple, who wrote the book on White House Chiefs of Staff, managed to get a remarkably candid series of on-the-record statements from Wiles about her colleagues and the inner workings of the second Trump administration over its first year.

As you might expect, nobody in the inner circle comes off particularly well in her account, and after seeing the piece in print, Wiles has, unsurprisingly, distanced herself from it. A “disingenuously framed hit piece,” she called it yesterday.

But who exactly is surprised to hear that Attorney General Pam Bondi mishandled the Jeffrey Epstein files, or that Office of Management and Budget head and Project 2025 author Russell Vought is a “right-wing absolute zealot,” or that Vice President JD Vance is driven by political concerns or into conspiracy theories? The supposed scandalousness of the revelations is mostly old news at this point.

But the institutional dysfunction she describes is very disturbing.