Vanity Fair thought it had something explosive: a two-part spread built around a flurry of interviews with Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles, packaged as the kind of inside scoop that would finally crack the Trump White House and send its accomplishments swirling away in a cloud of dust.

Instead, it fizzled.

According to Wiles, the magazine twisted and distorted her words, yanking them out of context to paint a darker picture of Trump’s inner circle. The intended effect was obvious. The result was not. No one panicked. No one splintered. No one got thrown under the bus. Quite the opposite — the team closed ranks.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made that clear in her response, signaling that whatever Vanity Fair hoped to ignite never caught fire.

One of the more breathless claims involved Wiles reportedly describing President Trump as having an “alcoholic’s personality.” Trump himself didn’t bristle at the description. In fact, he leaned into it. He has openly acknowledged having an obsessive, addictive streak — the kind that might lead someone else to alcohol — but in his case, he says, that drive is channeled into one thing: making America great again.

Another line Vanity Fair hoped would sting was Wiles allegedly calling Vice President J.D. Vance a longtime “conspiracy theorist.” Vance responded with a shrug and a laugh, explaining that the label is something he and Wiles have joked about before. After all, he says, believing stories the media won’t acknowledge until six months later apparently qualifies as conspiracy thinking these days.

That irony lands harder now that another so-called conspiracy theory has been confirmed: the FBI did not have proper justification to raid Mar-a-Lago in 2022. According to Kash Patel, documents turned over to Capitol Hill show the raid went forward anyway, under pressure from the Biden Justice Department, with at least one official quoted as “not giving a damn” before executing the search warrant.

That revelation sits awkwardly beside what Attorney General Merrick Garland told the country back in 2022.

It turns out Garland — and everyone involved — may have a lot to answer for.

Of course, this wasn’t entirely shocking. We already know that special counsel Jack Smith planted classified documents in the now-infamous “leaked” photo that was splashed across the media in an apparent effort to sway public opinion — and potential jurors — against President Trump.

Now Smith himself is under scrutiny, sitting for a closed-door deposition with lawmakers. Senator John Kennedy went into it with low expectations.

Smith had nothing to say to reporters afterward.

His lawyer, meanwhile, stuck to the familiar script, insisting Smith “only cares about the facts.”

So let’s talk about the facts.

Internal FBI emails now show, plainly, that there was little to no evidence supporting a raid on Mar-a-Lago. One message admits, “Very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling the documents.” Another asks, “We haven’t generated any new facts… Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site, at what point is it fair to table this? It is time consuming for the team, and not productive if there are no new facts supporting probable cause?”

At the same time, other emails reveal relentless DOJ pressure to proceed anyway — even acknowledging an “antagonistic” relationship with Trump’s team. One DOJ official bluntly wrote that he “didn’t give a damn” about the optics.

The FBI itself warned that a raid would be counterproductive and that there were far simpler ways to retrieve any sensitive documents. Yet Mar-a-Lago was raided anyway — a move that now looks less like law enforcement and more like theater.

Remember President Biden’s reaction at the time?

The outrage was rich, especially given what came later: Biden’s own classified documents, stashed in a garage.

Despite all this, Smith reportedly told lawmakers he stands by his investigation — an investigation that cost taxpayers more than $54 million, with roughly 65 percent going straight to salaries. He has suggested the case only ended because Trump became president again. In reality, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the documents indictment in July 2024 after ruling that Smith’s appointment by Garland violated the Constitution.

The Supreme Court also undercut much of the January 6 case with its immunity ruling in July, and another decision in June dismantled prosecutions of many January 6 defendants by rejecting the misuse of U.S. Code 1512 — the same statute Smith was trying to deploy against Trump.

The case was unraveling long before the election. Blaming the voters is simply more convenient.

That’s the through-line here, from Vanity Fair’s breathless hit pieces to DOJ pressure campaigns to a multimillion-dollar investigation built on animus instead of evidence.

The media wanted Susie Wiles’ comments to fracture the Trump White House. Instead, they exposed just how insulated this team is from manufactured scandals. No leaks. No infighting. No palace intrigue. Just a press corps tripping over itself to create drama that doesn’t exist.

It’s the same playbook they’ve run for nearly a decade: weaponize the federal government, leak selectively to friendly outlets, and hope the accusation does the damage.

But the receipts are catching up.

Internal FBI emails. DOJ officials admitting they didn’t care about optics. Agents warning a raid would be unnecessary and counterproductive — and yet the order came down anyway. Someone wanted the image. Someone wanted the photo. Someone wanted the headline.

This was never about classified documents. It was about politics.

It was about stopping Donald Trump by any means necessary, even if that meant bending the Constitution, ignoring probable cause, and burning tens of millions of taxpayer dollars along the way.

Now, as the walls close in on Jack Smith, the same voices that once insisted “no one is above the law” suddenly argue that scrutiny is unfair, that accountability is political, that questions are dangerous.

They’re wrong.

What’s dangerous is a justice system that answers to ideology instead of evidence. What’s dangerous is a DOJ that pressures the FBI to act first and justify later. And what’s dangerous is a media ecosystem that cheers it all on — until the facts leak out and expose the truth.

Americans were told to trust the process.

Now we’re seeing what the process really was — and we’re not buying it anymore.