President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, claimed that Vice President JD Vance is a “conspiracy theorist” and has been one for at least “a decade.” She made this statement in a major interview with Vanity Fair that was released on Tuesday. She put Vance in the same group as FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino when it came to understanding the “big deal” around the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying they all “lived in that world.”
Before he became a famous figure in Republican politics, Vance used to call conspiracy theories the ramblings of “fringe lunatics writing about all kinds of nonsense.”
But after he was promoted from a sensible Ohio Senator to second in command to Trump, he started believing in some wild and untrue ideas.
Since he joined the MAGA movement, Vance has claimed that Democratic governments allowed fentanyl into the U.S. to kill GOP voters, praised Sandy Hook-denier Alex Jones, and kept repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Before Trump’s broad pardons, he called Jan. 6 insurrectionists “political prisoners” and repeated the claim that Haitian immigrants have a taste for pets and abduct cats and dogs to eat.
Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and expert on conspiracy theories, said that Vance “entirely reinvented himself” before becoming a major figure in MAGA.
Wiles agrees. She said his shift toward Trump was “sort of political.”
“His conversion came when he was running for the Senate.
And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political,” she said, comparing his change with that of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had also had public clashes with Trump.
Vance himself said he had something of a Trumpian awakening.
“I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country,” he told Vanity Fair on Nov. 13.
Vance continues to spread conspiracy theories since becoming Vice President and has even brought in other conspiracy-mongers into U.S. politics.
In June, he had a one-on-one meeting with Laura Loomer. She has since been accepted by the Trump administration despite her wild ideas and her strong anti-Muslim views.
Outside of political theories, Vance also admitted that he is a “mad UFO believer” during an interview in late October.
He said both he and Marco Rubio have been interested in stories about flying saucers since their days in the Senate.
Wiles was interviewed by Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple over a long period, starting a week before Trump was sworn in for his second term, in early 2025.
She made several shocking comments, including that the president has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Wiles said she recognized parts of Trump’s personality from her former alcoholic father, who died in 2013 after being sober for 21 years.
“Some clinical psychologist who knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” Wiles said.
“But high-functioning alcoholics, or alcoholics in general, have exaggerated personalities when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She added that Trump “operates with a view that there’s nothing he can’t do—nothing, zero, nothing.“
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