‘Thank God’ for 'Dumb' Susie Wiles, Say Trump Foes
Trump’s chief of staff screwed up and gave a gift to his enemies, the US announces an oil blockade on Venezuela, and Elon Musk is back with more cash for... the Republicans.
🍩 On this day in 1989, ‘The Simpsons’ got its own Christmas special. The episode was viewed by a whopping 13.4 million people, was nominated for two Emmy awards, and is now the longest-running animated TV show in the US. (It also predicted a Trump presidency!)
Good morning! It’s Swin again, filling in for Peter. I wasn’t expecting to make another ‘First Draft’ cameo appearance quite so soon… but the Trump administration keeps stepping on its own collective dick. For much of Donald Trump’s second term, his White House has solidified a reputation (at least in the hive-minds of too many media headquarters) as a steady ship compared to the omni-shambolic heyday of the first Trump administration. The White House has a slight point – when you stack Trump 2.0 up against the mass turnover, wellsprings of leaking, self-inflicted wounds, and backstabbing that were unique to the early first term. However, as someone who covers the GOP and Trumpland day in and day out, I believed all year that the new reputation was largely unearned – the product of self-mythologizing. Below, we’ll get into one glaring example as to why.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump’s chief of staff’s big mouth causes yet another prosecution problem, Elon Musk slinks back to the Republican Party, Mike Johnson ensures Americans will pay more for healthcare, the Trump administration expands its cruel travel ban, the president launches an oil blockade against Venezuela, and Sudan tops an international emergency watchlist for the third year in a row.
‘Thank God They’re This Dumb’
Yesterday, after Vanity Fair published parts of its series of interviews with Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, my phone lit up with messages and calls from people working to impede the president’s authoritarian crusade to imprison a Who’s Who of his lengthy ‘enemies list.’ Some couldn’t believe their luck. “Thank God they’re this dumb,” one of these sources tells me.
According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, multiple attorneys working on the legal defenses for different high-profile political targets of the Trump Justice Department immediately started strategizing over a key portion of the Wiles interviews – for which the writer, Chris Whipple, says there are audio recordings.
Wiles told the magazine that Trump’s mission to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James “might be the one retribution.” When asked about Trump and his administration’s push to jail former FBI director James Comey, Wiles conceded: “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” She added that “when there’s an opportunity [for retribution], he will go for it.” Trump’s chief of staff told Vanity Fair that she and the president had “a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.” (Wiles, of course, failed to stop him.)
By Tuesday afternoon, the sources tell me, lawyers for a variety of Trump targets – those facing prosecution, those likely in-between criminal charges, those who aren’t charged yet but are getting their lives turned inside out by the feds – saw the Wiles tapes as a welcome opportunity.