Dec 16, 2025 (330/1461)
And from deep in the weeds comes a pretty close to tell-all piece on TOM & Co from the fly on the wall of every room, Susie Wiles! In a Vanity Fair piece, she let those lips flap and held back not a whole it seems about TOM and his cronies. “Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s understated but influential chief of staff, criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and offered an unvarnished take on her boss and those in his orbit in a series of observations that were published Tuesday in Vanity Fair. The first woman to ever hold her current post, Wiles pushed back on what she described as a “hit piece” that lacked context. But neither she, nor other West Wing officials who came to her defense, disputed any details in the profile — a wide-ranging narrative that included Wiles’ assessments of the teetotaling Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” Vice President JD Vance as a calculating “conspiracy theorist” and Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. as “quirky Bobby.” She said at one point that Trump’s tariffs had been more painful than expected. She conceded some mistakes in Trump’s mass deportation program and suggested that the president’s retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies has gone beyond what she initially wanted. Trump, she said, has “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, adding that Trump has “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” Well that last nugget certainly is no big secret. He not only thinks he can anything he wants to, he also does anything he wants to.
Just because DOGE is gone doesn’t mean the chainsaw has disappeared. Hegsloth is taking a hatchet to the top brass in DOD and saying you’re on your own to the majority of the rest of the world. “Senior Pentagon officials are preparing a plan that would downgrade several major U.S. military headquarters and shift power among top commanders, according to The Washington Post, which cited people familiar with the matter. If adopted, the proposal would reduce the number of combatant commands and cut the number of four-star generals and admirals reporting directly to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. People familiar with the plan told The Post the changes would complement Trump administration efforts to move resources away from the Middle East and Europe and focus more on the Western Hemisphere. The Post said the administration’s national security strategy, released this month, declares that the “days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The Post reported that the combined changes would reduce combatant commands from 11 to eight, leaving the Indo-Pacific, Cyber, Special Operations, Space, Strategic and Transportation commands among those remaining. Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned against consolidating too many commands. “The world isn’t getting any less complicated,” he told The Post.
Newsweek reported that retired Vice Adm. Robert Murrett warned the national security strategy could create “reverberations for years to come and possible near term security challenges,” including what he described as “soft language regarding China.” I feel like TOM thinks he can rely on a really big moat (yes, the oceans) to stave off attacks from the outside and that having strategic commands across the globe isn’t, well, strategic. Oh but it is OrangeMan, it is.
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