By BILL BARROW

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles offered an unusually candid look inside President Donald Trump’s administration in a series of interviews published Tuesday by Vanity Fair magazine, delivering details and reservations that presidential aides usually save for memoirs.

From criticizing Attorney General Pam Bondi as having “whiffed” on the Jeffrey Epstein case to saying that no rational person could believe Elon Musk did a good job dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, Wiles revealed her own thoughts about her boss and the work of his aggressive administration. The assessments are even more notable because Wiles, before now, has maintained a low profile.

Wiles dismissed Vanity Fair’s work as a “hit piece,” and a number of Cabinet officials and other aides rushed to her defense. But Wiles notably has not denied any details or quotes.

Here are some takeaways from Wiles’ interview:

Wiles defends Trump while comparing him to an alcoholic

Wiles described Trump as an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often unconcerned about process and policy details.

She assessed Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” even though the president does not drink. But the personality trait is something she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.

“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,” she said.

Said Wiles: “I’m not an enabler. … I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

Trump’s revenge crusade has gone longer than Wiles initially wanted

Wiles affirmed Trump’s ruthlessness and determination to achieve retribution against those he considers his political enemies, especially those who prosecuted him.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles said early in Trump’s second administration, telling Vanity Fair she did try to tamp down Trump’s penchant for retribution.

But in August 2025, she shifted. “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said, arguing Trump has a different principle: “‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’”

Still, she said, “there may be an element of that from time to time” and Trump “will go for it … when there’s an opportunity.”

“Who would blame him?” she asked rhetorically. “Not me.”

Asked about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Wiles allowed, “Well, that might be the one retribution.”

On Epstein, Pam Bondi gets scorched and Trump was ‘wrong’ about Bill Clinton

In some of her most eye-popping commentary, Wiles said Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on handling the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, particularly trying to manage public expectations by suggesting the Justice Department had a client list waiting to be disclosed only for the administration to later say it doesn’t exist.

Wiles also said Trump pushed false narratives that former President Bill Clinton frequented Epstein’s infamous island. “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles, and there are no damning findings concerning Clinton at all.

“The president was wrong about that,” Wiles said.

Wiles pays attention to Trump’s inner circle — and has thoughts

Wiles often sits to the side in the Oval Office, out of camera view. But she’s paying attention.

Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” she said, and his MAGA conversion — he once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler — was “sort of political.”

Elon Musk overstepped on his Department of Government Efficiency efforts, she said. She called him “a complete solo actor … an odd, odd duck” and an “avowed ketamine user.” (Musk has acknowledged using the dissociative anesthetic.) She recalled having to explain to him that “you can’t just lock people out of their offices” and said his gutting of USAID left her “initially aghast.“

“Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she said, adding that “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

She calls Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “quirky Bobby” and White House budget chief Russell Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot.”

But in praising Kennedy, Wiles explained her embrace of the administration’s hard-liners: “He pushes the envelope — some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”

Wiles sees Trump’s tariffs as ‘more painful’ than expected

Few events undermined Trump’s standing quite like his April 2 announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs, in which he announced import taxes ranging from 10% to 99% on most of the world. Trump’s move sparked recession fears and a delay in imposing his wider tariff strategy, leading to a rollercoaster of negotiations and new tariff threats.

Wiles called the April rollout “so much thinking out loud” and said there were internal disputes about it among Trump’s aides. She said she told aides to “work into what he’s already thinking” and asked Vance to tell Trump to “not talk about tariffs today” until his team was “in complete unity.”

Trump proceeded on his own.

Wiles said she believed a middle ground on tariffs would be successful. But, she concluded, “It’s been more painful than I expected.”

Wiles concedes mistakes on immigration

When a federal judge chided the administration for deporting Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Trump publicly defended the approach despite the administration telling the court it was a mistake. Wiles did not mince words, telling Vanity Fair at the time, “We’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation.”

When the administration deported two mothers and their U.S. citizen children, including one who was a cancer patient, Wiles was even more plainspoken: “It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know. I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Trump is more skeptical of Putin’s intentions than reflected in public

After nearly four years of fighting, Trump has made the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin can be persuaded to end the war in Ukraine if Kyiv agrees to cede Ukrainian land in the eastern Donbas region and if Western powers offer economic incentives that would bring Russia back into the economic world order.

“I actually think that President Putin wants to see it end,” Trump told reporters Monday.

But Wiles offered deep skepticism to Vanity Fair about Putin.

“The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles said in August, referring to the oblast that is a key part of Donbas.

“Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told her interviewer.

For Trump, boat strikes are about knocking Nicolás Maduro out of power

Wiles said in November that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”

Trump has repeatedly said Maduro’s “days are numbered” as the U.S. intensifies deadly attacks on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. The administration alleges the targets are drug-smuggling cartels.

Still, Trump and administration officials have stopped short of saying they want to topple the Maduro regime. They insist the strikes, which have killed at least 95 people in 25 known incidents since September, are a strategy to stem the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S.

Associated Press reporters Aamer Madhani and Josh Boak contributed from Washington.

By SOPHIE BATES

A woman who allegedly pushed razor blades into loaves of bread at two Biloxi, Mississippi, Walmart stores was arrested on Tuesday.

Camille Benson, 33, of Texas, has been charged with attempted mayhem. Her bond is set at $100,000.

Customers reported finding the razor blades at a Walmart Supercenter and a Walmart Neighborhood Market, said Lt. Candace Young, a public information officer for the Biloxi Police Department.

Walmart employees told police a customer first reported finding a razor blade in a loaf purchased from the Walmart Supercenter on Dec. 5. On Dec. 8, a customer who bought a loaf at the Walmart Neighborhood Market also reported finding a razor blade.

After another customer complained to the Walmart Supercenter on Sunday, employees inspected the merchandise and found several more loaves had been tampered with, law enforcement officials said.

The police department was notified on Monday.

In a press release, the department asked all citizens who bought bread from those Walmart locations to inspect the loaves and report any findings.

“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority,” Walmart said in a statement. “We have removed and thoroughly inspected all potentially affected products at impacted stores in Biloxi. We appreciate law enforcement for their swift action and will continue cooperating with them as they investigate.”

The Biloxi Police Department said it does not believe any other stores have been targeted.

If customers purchase a product that has been tampered with, they should immediately throw it out and visit their local Walmart for a full refund, the company said.

By MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country’s economy.

Trump’s escalation comes after U.S. forces last week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, an unusual move that followed a buildup of military forces in the region. In a post on social media Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to continue the military buildup until the country gave the U.S. oil, land and assets, though it was not clear why he felt the U.S. had a claim.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Pentagon officials referred all questions about the post to the White House.

The buildup has been accompanied by a series of military strikes on boats in international waters in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The campaign, which has drawn bipartisan scrutiny among U.S. lawmakers, has killed at least 95 people in 25 known strikes on vessels.

The Trump administration has defended it as a success, saying it has prevented drugs from reaching American shores, and they pushed back on concerns that it is stretching the bounds of lawful warfare.

The Trump administration has said the campaign is about stopping drugs headed to the U.S., but Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles appeared to confirm in a Vanity Fair interview published Tuesday that the campaign is part of a push to oust Maduro.

Wiles said Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”

Tuesday night’s announcement seemed to have a similar aim.

Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces about 1 million barrels a day, has long relied on oil revenue as a lifeblood of its economy.

Since the Trump administration began imposing oil sanctions on Venezuela in 2017, Maduro’s government has relied on a shadowy fleet of unflagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

The state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., commonly known as PDVSA, has been locked out of global oil markets by U.S. sanctions. It sells most of its exports at a steep discount in the black market in China.

Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston, said about 850,000 barrels of the 1 million daily production is exported. Of that, he said, 80% goes to China, 15% to 17% goes to the U.S. through Chevron Corp., and the remainder goes to Cuba.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the U.S. planned to enact what Trump called a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

But the U.S. Navy has 11 ships, including an aircraft carrier and several amphibious assault ships, in the region.

Those ships carry a wide complement of aircraft, including helicopters and V-22 Ospreys. Additionally, the Navy has been operating a handful of P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the region.

All told, those assets provide the military a significant ability to monitor marine traffic coming in and out of the country.

Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin in Washington and Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

Watch closely and see if California can turn a bad report card into a full-ride scholarship.

The bad report card is California’s abysmal record of waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. The full-ride scholarship is the continued employment, even re-election, of everyone responsible for it.

The California State Auditor has just released a report on its “state high-risk government agency audit program.” To land on the high-risk list, an agency or statewide issue must meet four conditions, starting with “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” or “impaired economy, efficiency or effectiveness” that may result in “serious detriment” to the state or its residents.

The other conditions are the “likelihood” of waste, fraud, etc., the lack of corrective action, and the potential for corrective action to fix the problem.

Guess how many agencies and statewide issues meet the “high-risk” conditions. If you guessed all of them, you may be psychic, but it’s currently seven. At least it was seven until this latest report. Now it’s eight.

The new “high-risk” agency is the California Department of Social Services. It joins the list because the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law earlier this year holds states accountable for a high “payment error rate” by making them pay a portion of the cost of benefits, in this case CalFresh benefits, that previously had been covered entirely by the federal government.

The California Department of Social Services administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, food stamps or CalFresh. Payment errors result from the lack of accurate verification of eligibility. This can be an overpayment to people who are not entitled to the benefits or an underpayment to people who are entitled to the benefits but are denied or paid the wrong amount.

The federal government has required states with a high payment error rate, 6 percent or above, to prepare a Corrective Action Plan. California has been submitting them every year since 2017.

But now federal law has been changed. States with high payment error rates have to “shoulder part of the cost of the program’s benefits,” as the auditor put it. Shouldering the cost will run California $1.2 billion if the state can get the payment error rate down to the range of 8-10 percent. It has been as high as 13.4 percent. Currently it’s almost 11 percent, and that means the state’s share of the program cost will be $2.5 billion.

For California’s elected officials, the challenge will be how to spin this story into a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, the one where the evil spray-tanned witch lures innocent children to a solid gold cottage and steals their lunch money.

But the reality is this: California has a major problem verifying the eligibility of individuals for government benefits. It’s not only CalFresh that has a high payment error rate.

Also on the “high-risk” list is the Employment Development Department, which the auditor says “continues to struggle with improper payments, claimant service and eligibility decision appeals.”

And still on the high-risk list: “the state’s management of federal COVID-19 funds.” The federal government provided $285 billion to California over two years. About $2 billion remains, which the auditor called “a significant amount for the State to manage.” Because of mismanagement, the state lost out on $820 million that expired unspent.

The auditor’s report notes that the state’s “late financial reporting remains a high-risk issue.” Late reporting can affect California’s cost of borrowing, making those massive statewide bond measures on your ballot even more expensive for taxpayers.

The always-struggling California Department of Technology has been on the “high-risk” list since 2007, and the auditor further warned that “the State’s information security remains a high-risk issue.” There’s a bedtime story that will keep you awake at night.

It’s all the same story. There’s no accountability at the state level.

The federal government is telling California to study harder and improve its grades, or the free ride stops.

Expect a tantrum.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley