by Miranda Devine
When it comes to hit jobs, the 10,000-word Vanity Fair spread on Susie Wiles is a classic of the genre.
Chris Whipple, a veteran journalist, producer and author with a career spanning the constellation of left-wing media — CBS’s “60 Minutes,” ABC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Politico, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post — has craftily framed the president’s chief of staff in a narrative of typical Trump-derangement fantasies.
The wonder is that she let him do it.
And there’s no doubt she did.
Washington journalism veteran Mark Halperin on his 2WAY podcast says Wiles may have thought the 11 interviews Whipple said she did this year were off the record.
Journalists talk to longtime sources all the time with an implicit understanding that everything’s off the record except when you come to a mutual agreement otherwise.
In an industry where trust is everything, burning a source by revealing off-the-record confidences is career-limiting to say the least.
Exhibit A: Olivia Nuzzi, the short-lived West Coast correspondent for Vanity Fair, has coined the term “Michael Wolffing it,” meaning telling a source everything is off the record and printing it anyway.
Trump biographer Wolff got rich burning sources and making up stories, but nobody buys his books or believes what he says anymore.
Nuzzi’s journalistic career is over — and not just for having affairs with the politicians she covers.
Wiles did not respond to The Post’s questions about whether she thought her conversations with Whipple were off the record — which is an answer in itself.
‘Tape recordings’
Whipple told The New York Times he has tape recordings.
On CNN he responded to Wiles furious statement that he had taken her out of context with a knowing smirk: “The giveaway, when you’re a journalist and you hear your target, the subject . . . talking about things like ‘context’ and ‘omissions,’ you know you’re on the right track because there isn’t a single fact or a single assertion that they’ve challenged in the piece.”
No surprise that he calls Wiles the “target,” which was probably not evident in their warm interactions, which he mentions throughout the piece as evidence of their intimacy.
He lists phone calls after she goes to church on Sundays, or when she’s sat home doing laundry.
He drops in the time she called him from her car.
There are clandestine sandwich lunches together in her office at the White House: “ ‘They don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, motioning toward the Oval, and laughed out loud.”
Whipple told CNN Wiles “wanted a fair hearing, and I think she thought she would get one.”
Sadly, she was wrong, because Whipple planted a series of mini-IEDs for her boss and his team to navigate.
First was how he weaved Democrat lies in between her quotes to try to make her complicit, such as that President Trump was using Charlie Kirk’s assassination in the same way that Hitler used the Reichstag fire, and “nine people ultimately died” in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Then came the quotes that have been quickly absorbed into the Democrat weapons cache.
“Susie Wiles on Donald Trump: ‘Has an alcoholic’s personality,’ ” the Democrat rapid-response team gloated. On Vice President JD Vance: “A conspiracy theorist.”
On Pam Bondi: “Completely whiffed.”
On Elon Musk: “Avowed ketamine user.”
Circling the wagons
While the saucy lines caused a lot of buzz in Washington, Trump and the administration quickly circled the wagons around Wiles and sang her praises, lauding her loyalty and leadership.
Her comment about Trump having an “alcoholic’s personality” was a compliment that came from personal experience, and the president knows it.
Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality [in that he] operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
As she told me on Pod Force One over the summer, her father, the late NFL player and then broadcaster Pat Summerall, was a recovering alcoholic and she recognized a similarity with Trump: “The competitiveness is the biggest thing . . . It came from very different beginnings, both of them, but the will to succeed lives large in Donald Trump, and it did my dad, too.”
Trump agreed, telling The Post: “She’s right . . . I don’t drink alcohol . . . but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself . . . It’s a very [obsessive] and addictive-type personality.”
Vance had the best response to the perceived slur that he is a conspiracy theorist.
He knows Wiles admires him.
His jolly response to a journalist’s question was a deadly barb cloaked in a joke.
“Sometimes I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true,” he said.
Then he listed several, from COVID lies to the Biden coverups and anti-Trump lawfare.
“A conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it.”
Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and press secretary Karoline Leavitt were interviewed for Vanity Fair’s hit piece, and posed for the most unflattering photos that could possibly be taken of naturally attractive people.
The frown on Vance’s face shows he knew it was a setup.
Extreme closeups that show every pore, blemish and wrinkle, and look more like mug shots than the flattering glamorous portraits we saw for Biden staffers — like Leavitt’s hopeless predecessor Karine Jean-Pierre.
Wiles is pictured with bug eyes.
I assume Annie Leibovitz was unavailable — she’s the Vanity Fair staple who has shot numerous glamorous photos of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their teams, exuding gravitas and unity.
Instead, photographer Christopher Anderson, known for his dark gritty snaps, was chosen.
His Instagram tells the story.
He has posted a video clip of someone saying of his Vanity Fair photos: “He didn’t make them look ugly. They are ugly.”
He also preciously posted a photo of Joe Biden walking down the big boy stairs of Air Force One with the caption: “We are about to miss this guy. Buckle up. See you in a week. I’m going dark . . .”
Disturbing pretext
It’s probably understandable that Wiles talked to Whipple under the pretext of updating his best-selling 2017 book about presidential chiefs of staff with a pen portrait of the first woman in the role and the most enigmatic and potentially most consequential of all.
None of it showed anyone in a bad light, least of all Wiles or Trump.
But the timing, in Vanity Fair’s January issue launching a difficult midterm year and the magazine’s foreboding photographs and layout, could not be worse.
The first lady’s lavish fly-on-the-wall Amazon documentary film “Melania,” which also comes out in January, is another wild card that may create vulnerabilities for Trump’s enemies to exploit.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.