The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Nonprofits across America are frantically scrubbing their IRS filings like it’s 1953 and Joe McCarthy just discovered the word “inclusion.” After Trump ordered his administration to root out “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — because nothing says law and order like threatening charities that help poor kids and sick people — more than 1,000 nonprofits quietly rewrote their mission statements to delete words like “disadvantaged,” “underrepresented,” and “racial equity.”

UNICEF USA no longer wants “a more equitable world for every child,” just a “better” one — whatever that means when the government has made “equity” a suspect word. The American Athletic Conference is still into “inclusion,” but apparently diversity and equity had to go live on a farm upstate. Community health centers now serve “all” instead of “medically underserved populations,” because if you don’t name the people being shafted, then surely the inequity disappears. Meanwhile, the Trump White House and IRS won’t even comment, while civil rights groups sue over these executive orders calling them unconstitutional and based on a “blatant and corrosive lie.”

In other words, Trump couldn’t repeal the Civil Rights Act, so he’s trying to intimidate anyone who notices racism still exists. Charities reliant on federal money — and even plenty that aren’t — are preemptively censoring themselves to avoid MAGA inquisitions into their HR trainings. But sure, the real “pernicious discrimination” here is a hospital hiring a DEI director, not the government using funding and investigations to scare organizations out of helping the people Trump’s base would prefer remain invisible.

NPR is apparently doing historical preservation now, inviting Leon Panetta — an actual former White House chief of staff from a functioning government — to talk about Susie Wiles and her interpretive dance version of the job in the Trump administration. Panetta once managed Bill Clinton’s West Wing; Wiles manages Donald Trump’s ego, legal exposure, and vendetta calendar — because nothing says "chief of staff" like doubling as the in-house retribution coordinator.

The segment teases a sober, institutional view of the role while Trump World treats it as a mix of concierge service, loyalty enforcement, and election-subversion logistics. In other words, Panetta is describing how the job works in a democracy, while Susie Wiles is busy showing us how it works in a personality cult that’s still mad the coup paperwork didn’t go through. But sure, let’s pretend this is just another normal chapter in American governance and not a live-fire stress test of whether the rule of law can survive a Mar-a-Lago guest list.

Susie Wiles, Trump’s famously silent White House chief of staff, apparently used all her inside voice at once for Vanity Fair, giving author Chris Whipple 11 on-the-record interviews over a year. Because nothing says "tight, disciplined operation" like your top aide unloading to a glossy magazine about how the West Wing is a clown car on fire. Whipple calls it reporter lightning; the Trump White House calls it Tuesday.

In those chats, Wiles took a blowtorch to pretty much everyone: Attorney General Pam Bondi, she says, "completely whiffed" on the Epstein files, which is a nice, polite way of saying "you had one job." Vice President J.D. Vance gets tagged as a "conspiracy theorist," which, in this administration, is like calling someone "middle management"—technically descriptive, but wildly understated. And for the big finale, Wiles describes Donald Trump as having "an alcoholic's personality." Trump, a non-drinker, then proudly confirms this to the New York Post because of course he does: "She's right. I do have an obsessive and addictive personality." In other words, the guy with the nuclear codes just self-identified as constitutionally incapable of moderation.

After the piece drops, Wiles storms onto X to denounce it as a "disingenuously framed hit piece" that paints an "overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative" about the president and his team—carefully avoiding disputing any actual facts. Whipple calmly notes that "not a single fact in the piece has been contested," which is journalist-speak for "they’re mad we printed what they said." So the chief of staff confirms the chaos, the president confirms his addictive personality, and no one disputes the reporting—but sure, the real problem here is the framing.