White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has offered an unusually candid account of internal discussions aimed at limiting President Donald Trump’s focus on political payback during his second term, describing early efforts to prevent what she warned could become a presidency defined by retribution.
In interviews conducted over the first year of the administration for a Vanity Fair profile by author Chris Whipple, Wiles said she directly cautioned Trump against allowing grievances with critics and adversaries to dominate his agenda. Recalling a conversation from March, she said she urged the president not to turn his return to office into what she described as a “retribution tour.”
“Yes, I do,” Wiles said in March. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
By August, when questions about retaliation resurfaced, Wiles sought to reframe Trump’s approach, arguing that his actions were rooted less in vengeance than in a desire to prevent what he views as abuses of power.
“A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government,” Wiles said. “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
Wiles pointed to allegations raised by Trump against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, over claims of mortgage fraud as what she characterized as the clearest example of potential payback, saying, “that might be the one retribution.”
The Justice Department under Trump pursued federal charges against James, but those efforts were dismissed by a judge in November over issues related to the prosecutor’s appointment, noted The Hill. Subsequent attempts to secure new indictments were also unsuccessful. A similar outcome followed in the case against former FBI Director James Comey, another frequent Trump critic, where charges were likewise thrown out.
“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution,” Wiles said of the president. “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
The issue surfaced publicly again in September, when Trump criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi in a Truth Social post, accusing her of moving too slowly against his adversaries. Allies of the president have defended the administration’s posture by pointing to Trump’s own legal battles after the 2020 election, which included federal and state indictments tied to efforts to challenge election results in Georgia and Washington, the handling of classified documents in Florida, hush money payments in New York, and a civil fraud case involving his business empire.
The chief of staff has claimed that several of her comments were taken out of context.
The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.
Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the…
— Susie Wiles (@SusieWiles) December 16, 2025
Wiles’s comments provide a rare window into the internal deliberations surrounding one of the most contentious themes of Trump’s second term, highlighting the tension between governing priorities and a president shaped by years of legal and political combat.
