Jermaine Fowler
December 17, 2025 (Wednesday)
Cruelty doesn’t sustain itself. It needs someone reasonable to keep it running.
Yesterday, Vanity Fair published photographs of the Trump White House.
Not the usual photographs. The magazine has spent decades translating power into glamour. Dictators become statesmen. Executives become visionaries. Everyone leaves more beautiful than they arrived. That’s the deal. Access for airbrush.
Christopher Anderson refused.
He shot them in extreme close-up. Clinical lighting. The kind a dermatologist uses to diagnose damage. Susie Wiles, chief of staff: steel-gray hair swept back, skin unretouched, pale blue eyes staring straight into the lens. Karoline Leavitt, press secretary: filler injection dots visible at the lip line, the work showing because no one asked the lens to forgive it. JD Vance, vice president: every pore visible, patchy beard, eyes fixed somewhere past the lens. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff: hollow-eyed, gaunt, unblinking.
The camera looks exactly like what it refuses to do.
None of us would look good in that light. But the camera refused to do the work that everyone around these people does every day. It refused to translate. To smooth. To make the unhinged sound strategic and the cruel sound necessary.
Wiles sat for it. For almost a year. On the record. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess. On Sundays after church. While folding laundry in her DC rental.
She talked.
Trump, she said, has “an alcoholic’s personality.”
Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Musk is “an avowed ketamine user.” When he reposted a tweet comparing public sector workers to those murdered under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”
On whether to pardon men who beat police officers nearly to death on January 6th: her team debated each case, but ‘if there’s a tie, he wins.
On prosecuting Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who won a $450 million fraud judgment against him: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
She said all of this. On the record.
And the moment it saw daylight: “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House Staff, and Cabinet in history.”
Confess. Recant. Repeat.
There’s a word for this. It has a clinical origin.
In 1951, Lois W. (last name withheld per the anonymous tradition), wife of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W., started gathering the wives of alcoholics while their husbands met in the living room. They sat in kitchens. They drank coffee. They compared notes. And they realized they were all doing the same things.
Calling the husband’s work to say he was sick when he was hungover. Going without groceries because the money went to alcohol. Lying to the neighbors. Lying to the children. Lying to themselves. Shielding him from every consequence that might have forced him to change.
They realized they had their own sickness — the enabling pattern — and founded Al-Anon as a separate recovery program for themselves.
The psychology is consistent across seventy years of research. Enablers soften or remove the natural consequences of problem behavior. They believe proximity is control, that staying close means having influence. They often grew up in dysfunction and learned the caretaker role early. They tell the truth when they feel safe. They take it back when the system demands.
You might recognize it closer to home.
The parent who keeps wiring money to a daughter who swears this is her last time. The son who still drives four hours for Christmas dinner with a father whose jokes get crueler with every glass of wine. The wife who tells the neighbors he’s just stressed at work. The sibling who keeps the peace with a brother who’s found religion and now sees demons in everything. The friend who says she’s fine, she’s handling it, he’s getting better. The girlfriend who says you don’t see what he’s like when it’s just the two of them.
Millions of Americans have lost someone to this. Not to death. To the staying. The translating. The smoothing. The desperate insistence that what you’re seeing isn’t what’s happening.
Now look at what the staying produced.
On September 2nd, a missile hit a suspected drug boat. The boat capsized. Two men ended up in the water, clinging to the hull, no longer a threat to anyone.
Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike.
They died in the water.
Ninety-five people killed in these strikes since September. House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes watched the video of that one. “One of the most troubling things I’ve seen as a lawmaker,” he said. “The United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
Legal experts have a simpler word. “The term for a premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder.”
A four-year-old boy named Romeo in the court filings. Born in Louisiana. Stage 4 kidney cancer. He was in the middle of treatment at a New Orleans children’s hospital when his mother brought him to a routine ICE check-in with his passport, as instructed.
They detained her. They flew the family to Honduras within twenty-four hours.
Romeo arrived without his medication.
“The family was held incommunicado,” his attorney said. No lawyers. No relatives. No one who could help.
He is five now. He is in Honduras. He has stage 4 cancer. He is an American citizen.
This week, Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk and posted that Rob Reiner died of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Reiner and his wife had been stabbed to death days earlier. Meanwhile, six hundred Americans lost their jobs for saying the wrong thing about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Civility, it turns out, is required in one direction only.
Wiles told Vanity Fair she was “aghast” at the USAID gutting. She couldn’t understand how they made that mistake with the deported mothers.
And she stayed. That’s the mechanism: staying converts moral shock into operational cover. The aghast one remains at the table. The cruelty continues. Now it has a conscience nearby, and the conscience didn’t leave.
Susie Wiles’s father was Pat Summerall. The voice of the NFL. An alcoholic.
She grew up staging interventions, helping her mother try to get him into treatment. He was sober twenty-one years before he died. But she learned the lessons long before that.
“Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she told Vanity Fair. “High-functioning alcoholics, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She recognized Trump immediately. That’s not interpretation. She said it.
In 2016, he berated her for over an hour at his Miami golf club. Midnight. A poll he didn’t like.
“It was horrific,” she said. “He was ranting and raving. I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
She didn’t leave.
“I’m not an enabler,” she told Vanity Fair.
She said this in an article where she described enabling everything.
JD Vance answered the question she won’t. “She’s a facilitator,” he said. “The American people elected Donald Trump. Her job is to facilitate his vision and make his vision come to life.”
Facilitate. Enable. Translate. Smooth.
Not restrain. Not prevent. Not stop. Make his vision come to life.
At what body count does the adult in the room become the room?
The camera caught what the enablers exist to hide.
Christopher Anderson shot them without translation, without softening, without the deal. Every line visible. Every year of the work.
Name one enabler who believed they were enabling. They all think they’re managing. Mitigating. Being the adult. The one who stays because someone has to stay.
Here’s the question the enabler never answers: if your presence restrains the worst impulses, why do the worst impulses keep winning? If proximity is influence, point to the atrocity that didn’t happen because you were in the room.
You can’t. Because that’s not what the room needed you for.
The kitchen-table wives figured it out in 1951. The staying is the sickness. The translation is what keeps the thing alive.
Power doesn’t need believers. It needs participants. The ones who stay. The ones who explain. The ones who keep their eyes on the center while the edges burn.
Confess. Recant. Repeat.
The people in the water are still dead. Romeo is still in Honduras.
Look at the photograph. Wiles’s pale blue eyes, steady, still watching the lens.
Not looking at the water. Never at the water.