Coffee Break: MAGA’s Messaging Meltdown Snags Susie Wiles, Kash Patel’s FBI

MAGA’s Messaging Meltdown this week has seen the Trump team failing utterly in their area of core competence: controlling the narrative.

UPDATE: Dec 17 17:45PM Dan Bongino announced his resignation from the FBI. Details at the bottom of the post.

This comes at a time when, as Politico writes:

the Trump administration grapples with a host of bad headlines: the unemployment rate is up and Trump’s approval ratings are down. Election losses and GOP underperformance have top Republicans worried about a potentially disastrous midterm election, and there is growing fear on the right about a land war in Venezuela.

The Wiles interview (in Vanity Fair) fuels the idea that events are leading Trump rather than the other way around. Over the last few weeks the White House has suffered a series of setbacks on everything from Congress voting to compel the release of the Epstein files to the courts tossing out cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

Fish rot from the head, so let’s start at the top.

Trump Got Close to the Edge With Reiner Remarks

As Aaron Mate told Judge Napolitano, POTUS Trump might be right that the late, great Rob Reiner had Trump Derangement Syndrome and lots of CIA connections, but the day of the great man’s death wasn’t the time for the President of the United Sates to put out this statement about it:

Trump’s crass tastelessness drew fire from the Hollywood right, black pilled Zoomer Nick Fuentes, and Congressional MAGA and RINO Republicans alike.

I’ll give credit for doubling down though. He may be rapidly senescecizing but he knows rule #1 of media teflon: never apologize, never back down.

When asked at a press conference, “Do you stand by that post?”, Trump said:

Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. And he said uh he liked he knew it was false. In fact, it’s the exact opposite that I was uh a friend of Russia controlled by Russia.

You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it. I think he hurt himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome. So, I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.

If it wasn’t for the MSM implosion of Trump’s White House Chief of Staff and his FBI Director, I would probably chalk the Reiner kerfluffle up to gossip controversy of the day ephemeral nonsense.

But Trump’s being failed by his team, as always given his narcissist’s through-a-mirror-darkly cockeye for talent.

Susie Wiles Falls in the Vanity Fair Tarpit

Vanity Fair may not be what it used to be, but it still has a unique hold on the American media and political elite.

As such a Vanity Fair cover story has a magnet tar pit trap allure that’s proven the ruin of many a poor aspiring President and the worst Presidential administration of the 21st century:

Who looked at this photo and said yeah, lets do it again! pic.twitter.com/kpb1jiqsa9

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) December 16, 2025

Susie Wiles, Trump’s 68-year-old Chief of Staff, couldn’t resist and she’s currently trapped in the hot tar and dragging as much of the administration in with her as she can.

She made the decision to give the magazine 11 sit down interviews over several months and now here’s her response (in her first tweet in over a year):

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

Maybe she was angry in part because of the way Vanity Fair, like any big game hunter, bragged about their trophy kill:

“Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background,” reports Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple. “But over many on-the-record conversations, [Susie] Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.”

Part 2 of 2: https://t.co/4eezfCsdkR pic.twitter.com/0dSbuOLJ5A

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) December 16, 2025

Or maybe it’s because of the many bombshells she dropped on “alcoholic personality” Trump and her colleagues like “odd duck” Elon Musk and JD Vance (who she’ll be supporting in 2028).

She also had spicy comments about the “vindictive prosecutions” of James Comey and Letitia James (“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”), Trump and Jeffrey Epstein (“they were young bachelors together”), and Trump’s Venezuela strategy being about Maduro, not druges (“wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me say that he will.”).

Wiles also claimed she had a “loose agreement” with Trump to end the “score settling” after his first 90 days.

The above was me summarizing the Axios piece I linked to give readers an idea what’s ricocheting around the social media being followed by the MSM.

Like most other semi-employed Americans I don’t have time to wallow in a Vanity Fair celebrity gossip insider piece, but here are links to part 1 and part 2.

I do highly recommend this TikTok analysis of the brilliance of Vanity Fair’s visual take down of Trump’s team by Kendall Ally Brown.

@kendallybrown

That Vanity Fair piece is a million times more brutal once you start noticing these subtle details in a bunch of the photographs used. I would simply walk into the ocean and never return if something like this was published about me lol

♬ original sound – Kendall Brown

I’ll also point out The Financial Times Christopher Miller’s counter to Treasury Secretary Bessant’s backstory of the infamous February live-from-the Oval Office blow up between Trump, Vance and the Ukrainian President.

Some MSNBC’s MS Now dude’s dire warning that “Unlike John Kelly, who tried to prevent Trump from committing crimes or doing something unwise, Susie Wiles wants to facilitate his desires.”

And this New York Times-er’s savvy scorekeeping in Wiles’ favor, “the pushback’s a bit funny because the Vanity Fair piece doesn’t dispute that Susie Wiles’s leadership has been effective at achieving Trump’s agenda.”

I’ll include this psuedonymous pro-Ukrainian memester’s gutter gossip take because a well-crafted hit tweet like this has to be seen to be believed:

So now the Trump administration and all of MAGA social media is saying that Vanity Fair did a "hit piece" when they published a photo showing Karoline Leavitt's – to put it mildly – disturbing looking lips. And either she's got some type of leprosy of the lips, or to quote… pic.twitter.com/l0fkCt7XFs

— PaulleyTicks (@PaulleyTicks) December 17, 2025

I can’t resist sharing this well-crafted meta New Journalism money shot Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple dropped in his fourth paragraph:

We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)
Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.

I’ll also quote how the NY Times rewrote what she said about Attorney General Pam Bondi, J.D. Vance and the Epstein files:

“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Ms. Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” Mr. Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself was “a conspiracy theorist,” she said.

Ms. Wiles said she has read the Epstein documents and acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s name is in them. “We know he’s in the file,” she said. “And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”

Mr. Musk has acknowledged trying ketamine “a few years ago,” but denied reports of more recent use. In the interview with The Times on Monday, Ms. Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about his drug use. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But Mr. Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.

Amateur hour move on Wiles’ part to try to deny a quote with a trained media assassin like Whipple who doesn’t have a kill unless he can prove it to multiple fact checkers with solid documentation.

Trump’s team circled the wagons around Wiles, taking their que from Trump who gave his loyal ally The New York Post a vintage Trump response to Wiles’ alcoholic comment.

J.D. Vance had the slickest response, after bragging he hadn’t read the article:

“Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true,” Vance said.

“And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time,” Vance continued. “For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills. I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job.”

He added: “If any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets.”

So no open public infighting from inside the White House, but Politico has the anonymous quotes which are all focused on the Vanity Fair piece as a tactical misstep rather than a betrayal:

the more than 10,000-word Vanity Fair spread, based on 11 interviews over the course of a year, glossy photo-spreads and on-the-record quotes from Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had many of Trump’s allies scratching their heads, wondering why the very top of the administration would participate in the interview. And how could Wiles, lauded for her political acumen and loyalty, have miscalculated so badly?

The interview was “extremely demoralizing,” said a person close to the White House.

A second person close to the White House said simply: “So far … WTF.”

A third person close to the White House said they’ve known Wiles for decades and was “very surprised” that she participated.
…
The third person said there is a lot of GOP frustration that the White House seems undisciplined at a time it needs to hammer its accomplishments on the economy.

“What are we talking about? Jeffrey Epstein and Venezuela? James Comey? Letitia James? There’s a frustration on that, and I think a lot of that is frustration with the White House, but a lot of it is frustration with the president,” the person said.

The piece lands as the Trump administration grapples with a host of bad headlines: the unemployment rate is up and Trump’s approval ratings are down. Election losses and GOP underperformance have top Republicans worried about a potentially disastrous midterm election, and there is growing fear on the right about a land war in Venezuela.

The Wiles interview fuels the idea that events are leading Trump rather than the other way around. Over the last few weeks the White House has suffered a series of setbacks on everything from Congress voting to compel the release of the Epstein files to the courts tossing out cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

So even if MAGA’s messaging meltdown isn’t tearing apart the Trump team, we might have a couple of ugly ducklings working hard to get kicked off the island.

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino Standing Out for Stupid

Trump’s FBI brain trust may not have been dragged too deeply into Wiles’ Vanity Fare mire, but they’re getting plenty of negative attention all on their own.

Here’s what the NY Times is saying about “the bureau’s self-promotional top official” FBI Director Kash Patel in the kind of big feature piece that qualifies as bad-jacketing in every sense of the term:

Mr. Patel’s impulse to seize the spotlight and publicize the work of the bureau under his leadership has revived questions about his competence and his future in the administration. It has added to the growing criticism over his recreational travel, his use of a SWAT team to protect his girlfriend and his handling of the Epstein files.
…
Yet even if Trump officials have privately criticized Mr. Patel for embarrassing the administration, particularly over his use of government assets, rumors about his firing or forced resignation have yet to materialize. In fact, Mr. Patel has recently told people in his orbit he intends to stay on at least through the 2026 midterm elections, while acknowledging that the president could change his mind at any time.

One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters, according to several people familiar with the situation who discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

The fate of Mr. Patel’s top deputy, Dan Bongino, another incendiary former podcaster and longtime Trump loyalist, appears to be more settled, though not entirely certain.

We’ll come back to Bongino but first we have to discuss the YouTube mess Patel and his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins stepped into when trying to do a lifestyle interview with influencer Katie Miller.

This interview proved so ill-timed that it’s YouTube description now reads “THIS INTERVIEW WAS TAPED BEFORE THE HORRIFIC SHOOTING AT BROWN UNIVERSITY.”

No need to yell, Katie.

Wilkins is most likely to be remembered for making the Mick-Jagger-sues-The-News-of-the-World-mistake when she sued an ex-FBI agent and podcaster Kyle Seraphin who accused her of being a “honeypot” for Mossad.

The memorably named Seraphin’s podcast was also the show where “far-right influencer, FBI agent and former Patel ally” and January 6th MAGA martyr got himself fired from Patel’s FBI for this memorable (and chilling) rant:

You better pray to Gaia, Vishnu or whatever your maker is that RealSteveFriend is never in a position to be an instrument of God’s wrath, because I will be merciful. I’ll allow you to breathe every breath that your body will have for the rest of its natural life inside of a box, and then when it ultimately fades to black, that’s when the real wrath begins.

The Venn Diagram of former Federal Agent influencers and psychopaths does appear to be a circle, but this was something else.

But back to Patel’s most recent podcast-bourne self-inflicted wound.

The RINO-ish outlet Mediaite had a tut-tutting take on the interview:

The interview Kash Patel recently gave alongside his girlfriend, country music performer Alexis Wilkins, was not a lapse in judgment or a failure to read the room. It was not a distraction from his duties as FBI director. It was an expression of how he understands those duties.

Patel appeared in a friendly, lifestyle-style conversation hosted by Katie Miller, wife of senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, ostensibly to “demystify” conspiracy theories and humanize his relationship. Instead, the appearance landed as jarring and unserious. Miller released a teaser video in which they laugh at the conspiracy theory that Wilkins is a Mossad agent; you can watch it above.

Critics across ideological lines questioned why the director of the FBI was focused on correcting gossip and narrating his personal life while the suspect in the deadly shooting at Brown University remained at large. Former prosecutors, media critics, and even some conservative commentators described the interview as tone-deaf, indulgent, and emblematic of skewed priorities at the bureau’s highest level.
…
That reaction matters—not because Patel offended sensibilities, but because it exposed a deeper mismatch between what the public still expects of the FBI director and what Patel appears to think the job requires.

The traditional FBI director has primarily been defined by restraint, distance, and near-total invisibility, with some notable exceptions. The office’s authority flows from its refusal to personalize power. Patel does the opposite. He surfaces constantly. He narrates himself. He treats public visibility not as a risk to institutional credibility, but as a feature of leadership.

Patel was not installed to preserve the bureau’s post-Hoover model of apolitical authority. He was installed to more than disrupt it, but to personalize it in the image of a decidedly pro-Trump institution — to make the FBI legible as loyal, visible, and aligned with President Donald Trump rather than insulated from him. An FBI director who performs loyalty in public is telegraphing that investigations will flow from political will, not institutional independence.

I can’t decide if Mediaite and their analysis is like a blind squirrel bragging about the cherry they think they found that’s actually a hand grenade or vice-versa.

Regardless, Patel is putting off a stink of stupid AND drawing attention to himself.

Surely Patel knows drawing too much attention to yourself is the cardinal sin of Trumpworld.

That’s been known since Steve Bannon got fired in 2017, not for comparing himself to Thomas Cromwell, but for getting too much positive press doing so.

One podcaster who appears to have flown too close to the sun is Patel’s sidekick Dan Bongino.

Podcasting G-Man Going Down?

For those not into ex-Feds-turned-podcasters, here’s how Wikipedia introduces its bio of FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino who appears to be on his way out:

Daniel John Bongino (/bɒndʒiːnoʊ/ bon-JEE-noh; born December 4, 1974) is an American conservative political commentator, radio host, and former law enforcement officer who has served as the 20th deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since 2025. He hosted The Dan Bongino Show on Rumble and previously hosted Unfiltered with Dan Bongino on Fox News until April 2023.

Bongino began his career as a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer from 1995 to 1999 before serving as a U.S. Secret Service agent from 1999 to 2011. He later unsuccessfully ran for Congress three times as a Republican. On February 23, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that Bongino had been named the next deputy director of the FBI. He assumed office on March 17, after concluding his commentating roles on March 14.

It’s also worth including the section on Bongino’s big plans for his FBI tenure:

In May 2025, Bongino announced that he and Patel would reopen or dedicate additional resources to three unresolved investigations: the pipe bombs placed near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters on January 5, 2021; the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion in 2022; and the discovery of cocaine at the White House in July 2023. Later that month, Bongino claimed on Fox News that the FBI had discovered a room containing documents from former FBI Director James Comey’s tenure that had not been properly digitized or logged, stating “you’re going to be stunned” by the contents once declassified.

Now it appears to be all over, per The NY Sun piece titled: “Dan Bongino’s FBI Office Is Empty and His Chief of Staff Has Moved On: Ex-Podcaster May Be Gone Come January 2026, FBI Insiders Predict.”

Some deets about his likely successors:

(Bongino’s) departure, which has been rumored in recent weeks, may have already been put into motion. In November, Mr. Bongino’s chief of staff, Jimmy Paul, was named the special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office, after he served in his role with Mr. Bongino for only nine months, according to his public LinkedIn page.

As Mr. Bongino’s chief of staff, Mr. Paul, a 17-year FBI veteran, was the FBI’s first-ever Indian American to hold that role, according to a social media post from the fraternal organization American Malayalee Law Enforcement United. The FBI did not respond to questions from the Sun on whether a new chief of staff for Mr. Bongino had been named.

Meanwhile, last week, the FBI’s new co-Deputy Director, Andrew Bailey – who raised eyebrows when he left his powerful role as Missouri’s elected attorney general for the FBI job – was part of a U.S. delegation that joined the attorney general, Pam Bondi, during her trip to Rome to attend the Palermo Protocol Conference on human trafficking, a person close to the meeting told the Sun. Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department did not respond to questions on whether Mr. Bongino was originally slated to be part of Ms. Bondi’s delegation.

In recent weeks, Mr. Bailey was reportedly being considered as the replacement for the embattled FBI Director, Kash Patel. This weekend, Mr. Patel’s reputation took yet another blow when he touted on social media that a suspect in the Brown University shooting had been detained, only for that suspect to be released a short while later. Mr. Patel had made a similar announcement during the early stages of the FBI’s investigation into the Charlie Kirk assassination, which he was also forced to walk back.

Should Mr. Bongino depart, Mr. Bailey is expected to assume Mr. Bongino’s role and become the FBI’s deputy director, considered the bureau’s most demanding job, in January 2026.

Given that Bongino’s entire agenda oriented around the kind of backward-looking vendettas that Susie Wiles claims she got Trump to drop after the first 90 days, it’s no surprise he’s on his way out.

Will Patel last much longer given he’s pretty much on the same tip?

Stay tuned to this blog for more MAGA meltdowns as they occur.

UPDATE: Dan Bongino announced he’s out today:

I will be leaving my position with the FBI in January.
I want to thank President Trump, AG Bondi, and Director Patel for the opportunity to serve with purpose.
Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you.
God bless America, and…

— Dan Bongino (@FBIDDBongino) December 17, 2025