What Was Susie Wiles Thinking?
My guess is that she wanted to be understood, which is almost always a mistake in public life.
President Trump’s address to the nation Wednesday evening was bracing and, as such things go, revealing. As is often the case with Mr. Trump there was text and subtext—the sparkling surface and, below, deeper currents that tugged this listener’s thoughts toward the more fundamental meaning of Mr. Trump’s efforts and a realization, once again, that with this president one is in the hands not of a mere magician, but a master.
Ha, just kidding. The ghost of Walter Lippmann leaning into the wireless to hear FDR . . . stole into me. Why should only AI get to hallucinate? Why can’t I have Franklin Roosevelt?
As a piece of work Mr. Trump’s speech was blunt and blubbery, didn’t persuade but only asserted, and not in a winning way. It was propaganda that didn’t bother to make believe it wasn’t propaganda, which always feels like an insult. His mouth moved oddly, as if he were mad at his words.
“One year ago our country was dead.” “Eleven months ago I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it.” “I was elected in a landslide.” He’s in good shape because he beats so many dead horses. It keeps the arms and shoulders up.
I liked, “Good evening, America,” because it was new, Trumpian—why talk to your fellow citizens when you can talk to a continent?—and sounded like the name of a bouncy new television show, which I’m sure it will soon be.
If you liked him you liked it, if not you didn’t, but he did nothing to draw you into his way of thinking, bring you along, increase your confidence, kindle a little faith.
So, a missed opportunity. Here I mention that it would be nice if presidents returned to making national addresses from the big desk in the Oval Office. A full generation of White House advisers decided that image was static and inert, that a president looks more dynamic if he’s standing, with long halls or mantles behind him. It doesn’t look dynamic; it looks tentative, as if he’s afraid to settle into a line of thought. He looks as if he just strolled by and bumped into a podium. Men at desks are committing to a conversation. A brave president, probably a woman, will some day go back to the Resolute, sit, and share her thinking.
Mr. Trump is charged with seeming detached from the citizenry’s experience of inflation. His recent and most persuasive critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, reminds us he is a billionaire. Nothing showed the distance between Mr. Trump and regular Americans like the Journal’s report this week on the degree to which the president and his family have prospered financially since he re-entered office. David Uberti, Juanje Gómez and Kara Dapena reported the Trump family has enjoyed a “major expansion” of its “vast” array of business interests—in crypto, communications and financial products, added to its older holdings in real estate and golf courses. The Trump organization has “launched a host of new ventures and products, from memecoins to data centers.”
Wealth insulates. The wealthy know this and try to compensate in everything from their philanthropy to visiting grocery stores now and then to learn the price of ground chuck. Voters, including Mr. Trump’s supporters, look at him, know it insulates him, and wonder exactly how such significant new wealth has attached itself to him and his family—how exactly that works, what exactly got traded, whether or not that’s all fully right.
Finally, the most vivid communications-burst from the Trump White House came this week from the long-form profile of the previously silent White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Vanity Fair. It’s a lollapalooza. A scoop’s a scoop, a story’s a story, none can decry it. She had her reasons for sitting down with former “60 Minutes” and cable news producer Christopher Whipple, who has written a book on presidential chiefs of staff. But nobody knows what they were.
Her essential judgments on persons and events, as quoted, make her look wise and perceptive, which is her general reputation, but she was also indiscreet.
Other staffers and officials cooperated in the spread. The minute I saw it I thought: They think they’re going to get the positive treatment the George W. Bush White House got in a cover story in Vanity Fair in 2002—rich, handsome photos, no embarrassing quotes. But that was just after 9/11 and before Iraq. America needed a lift. Attractive young Mr. Bush, Condi Rice’s star power, Ol’ Reliables Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld—it was another world.
My guess is that Ms. Wiles took part because she wanted to be understood, which is almost always a mistake in public life—you’ve got to have a harder, meaner objective than that—and wanted the White House understood, a nobler objective but one that wasn’t going to happen. Vanity Fair does not exist to “understand” Donald Trump.
The accompanying photo portraits are mostly hideous, in Ms. Wiles’s case also ill-mannered and unkind. She is the first woman to be a White House chief of staff, a lady of a certain age and accomplishment who swims in the highest of high seas. She is presented as bug-eyed and insane, as Mrs. Lovett asking if you wouldn’t like another piece of pie. Nice people hate it when Mr. Trump shows no class; they ought to feel it when his foes show none.
Ms. Wiles seems, in the piece, to have been allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to view her interlocutor as her friend, her jolly confidante. She talks to him while doing the wash.
This reminded me of some stinging words, among the most famous ever written about journalism, by a journalist herself: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
That is Janet Malcolm, from her book “The Journalist and the Murderer.” She was one of the great, singular, unflinching writers of her generation, which included Joan Didion, in relation to whom she had an equal or superior level of talent without the promotional ability. Malcolm wasn’t damning her profession but admitting its members place themselves in moral peril, cultivating an atmosphere of intimacy with a subject, for instance, and then treating the material roughly. The subject is left, on publication, humiliated. Malcolm thought journalists must proceed with humility, and an awareness of the central fact of what they’re doing.
Mr. Whipple, in his media victory lap, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that normally when he’s spoken to former chiefs of staff they’ve toggled between background, off the record and on. Ms. Wiles didn’t, he said. He seemed almost to giggle, but stopped himself.
Practical if cynical advice to future White House staffers: If you’re going to do a series of interviews in which you share plain-spoken thoughts and views, do it with a writer working the beat who will continue to need you as a source, someone whose flourishing depends to some degree on your goodwill.
You need them basting you like a turkey in the oven, not carving you up on the cutting board.
President Trump’s address to the nation Wednesday evening was bracing and, as such things go, revealing. As is often the case with Mr. Trump there was text and subtext—the sparkling surface and, below, deeper currents that tugged this listener’s thoughts toward the more fundamental meaning of Mr. Trump’s efforts and a realization, once again, that with this president one is in the hands not of a mere magician, but a master.
Ha, just kidding. The ghost of Walter Lippmann leaning into the wireless to hear FDR . . . stole into me. Why should only AI get to hallucinate? Why can’t I have Franklin Roosevelt?
As a piece of work Mr. Trump’s speech was blunt and blubbery, didn’t persuade but only asserted, and not in a winning way. It was propaganda that didn’t bother to make believe it wasn’t propaganda, which always feels like an insult. His mouth moved oddly, as if he were mad at his words.
“One year ago our country was dead.” “Eleven months ago I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it.” “I was elected in a landslide.” He’s in good shape because he beats so many dead horses. It keeps the arms and shoulders up.
I liked, “Good evening, America,” because it was new, Trumpian—why talk to your fellow citizens when you can talk to a continent?—and sounded like the name of a bouncy new television show, which I’m sure it will soon be.
If you liked him you liked it, if not you didn’t, but he did nothing to draw you into his way of thinking, bring you along, increase your confidence, kindle a little faith.
So, a missed opportunity. Here I mention that it would be nice if presidents returned to making national addresses from the big desk in the Oval Office. A full generation of White House advisers decided that image was static and inert, that a president looks more dynamic if he’s standing, with long halls or mantles behind him. It doesn’t look dynamic; it looks tentative, as if he’s afraid to settle into a line of thought. He looks as if he just strolled by and bumped into a podium. Men at desks are committing to a conversation. A brave president, probably a woman, will some day go back to the Resolute, sit, and share her thinking.
Mr. Trump is charged with seeming detached from the citizenry’s experience of inflation. His recent and most persuasive critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, reminds us he is a billionaire. Nothing showed the distance between Mr. Trump and regular Americans like the Journal’s report this week on the degree to which the president and his family have prospered financially since he re-entered office. David Uberti, Juanje Gómez and Kara Dapena reported the Trump family has enjoyed a “major expansion” of its “vast” array of business interests—in crypto, communications and financial products, added to its older holdings in real estate and golf courses. The Trump organization has “launched a host of new ventures and products, from memecoins to data centers.”
Wealth insulates. The wealthy know this and try to compensate in everything from their philanthropy to visiting grocery stores now and then to learn the price of ground chuck. Voters, including Mr. Trump’s supporters, look at him, know it insulates him, and wonder exactly how such significant new wealth has attached itself to him and his family—how exactly that works, what exactly got traded, whether or not that’s all fully right.
Finally, the most vivid communications-burst from the Trump White House came this week from the long-form profile of the previously silent White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Vanity Fair. It’s a lollapalooza. A scoop’s a scoop, a story’s a story, none can decry it. She had her reasons for sitting down with former “60 Minutes” and cable news producer Christopher Whipple, who has written a book on presidential chiefs of staff. But nobody knows what they were.
Her essential judgments on persons and events, as quoted, make her look wise and perceptive, which is her general reputation, but she was also indiscreet.
Other staffers and officials cooperated in the spread. The minute I saw it I thought: They think they’re going to get the positive treatment the George W. Bush White House got in a cover story in Vanity Fair in 2002—rich, handsome photos, no embarrassing quotes. But that was just after 9/11 and before Iraq. America needed a lift. Attractive young Mr. Bush, Condi Rice’s star power, Ol’ Reliables Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld—it was another world.
My guess is that Ms. Wiles took part because she wanted to be understood, which is almost always a mistake in public life—you’ve got to have a harder, meaner objective than that—and wanted the White House understood, a nobler objective but one that wasn’t going to happen. Vanity Fair does not exist to “understand” Donald Trump.
The accompanying photo portraits are mostly hideous, in Ms. Wiles’s case also ill-mannered and unkind. She is the first woman to be a White House chief of staff, a lady of a certain age and accomplishment who swims in the highest of high seas. She is presented as bug-eyed and insane, as Mrs. Lovett asking if you wouldn’t like another piece of pie. Nice people hate it when Mr. Trump shows no class; they ought to feel it when his foes show none.
Ms. Wiles seems, in the piece, to have been allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to view her interlocutor as her friend, her jolly confidante. She talks to him while doing the wash.
This reminded me of some stinging words, among the most famous ever written about journalism, by a journalist herself: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
That is Janet Malcolm, from her book “The Journalist and the Murderer.” She was one of the great, singular, unflinching writers of her generation, which included Joan Didion, in relation to whom she had an equal or superior level of talent without the promotional ability. Malcolm wasn’t damning her profession but admitting its members place themselves in moral peril, cultivating an atmosphere of intimacy with a subject, for instance, and then treating the material roughly. The subject is left, on publication, humiliated. Malcolm thought journalists must proceed with humility, and an awareness of the central fact of what they’re doing.
Mr. Whipple, in his media victory lap, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that normally when he’s spoken to former chiefs of staff they’ve toggled between background, off the record and on. Ms. Wiles didn’t, he said. He seemed almost to giggle, but stopped himself.
Practical if cynical advice to future White House staffers: If you’re going to do a series of interviews in which you share plain-spoken thoughts and views, do it with a writer working the beat who will continue to need you as a source, someone whose flourishing depends to some degree on your goodwill.
You need them basting you like a turkey in the oven, not carving you up on the cutting board.
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