Wiles has rejected claims that she is feuding with Ric Grenell. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff neither has a fight with Grenell nor did she block a meeting between Aleksandar Vucic and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, as The Pavlovic Today first reported.
The renewed claims surfaced this week in a Daily Mail article alleging that Grenell was at odds with Wiles and that she had torpedoed a meeting he arranged between Vucic and Trump in May 2025. The Daily Mail falsely reported that Wiles personally “blocked” the encounter, leaving Vucic in an “awkward position” and signaling that Grenell’s “days of operating independently” were under close scrutiny. But those claims were already debunked.
When the conspiracy theories first began circulating in May last year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Pavlovic Today exclusively that the story was “fake news.” Leavitt categorically denied that Trump’s chief of staff had barred Vucic from attending an event at Mar-a-Lago.
Now Wiles herself has stepped in. Following renewed coverage — with Grenell placed at the center of the claims — Wiles telephoned the Daily Mail to shut down reports that she had clashed with him at the Republican National Convention.
“You know, he’s not my best friend,” Wiles said Friday morning. “We don’t particularly socialize, but this notion that we have some fight — I don’t know it, and I don’t think he feels that way about me.” She added: “I can’t say I’ve never been brought to tears, but it isn’t often — and never by him. This argument never happened.”
White House insiders suggest that the purveyor of this political gossip are simply unsettled by Grenell’s continued prominence and the prospect of a senior appointment. In Washington, as in Rome, ambition is rarely a spectator sport.
At the outset of Trump’s second term, Grenell was appointed special envoy to Venezuela, tasked with pursuing negotiations with President Nicolás Maduro.
The Daily Mail also reported that Marco Rubio, with Wiles’ backing, had “elbowed” Grenell out of the Venezuela portfolio as policy hardened. Grenell, initially tasked with pursuing negotiations with Nicolás Maduro, reportedly favored diplomacy — prisoner releases, oil arrangements, the slow grind of dealmaking — rather than the nondiplomatic approach advocated by Rubio.
Yet even here, the larger foreign policy arc is hard to ignore. Grenell remains the architect of the historic 2020 Washington Agreement between Belgrade and Pristina — a diplomatic gambit Trump himself once suggested deserved a Nobel Prize.
The story of Wiles “hating” Grenell, the story of a steely White House gatekeeper blocking his ascent, is false.
The iron lady of this White House is not at war. And the Vucic-Trump meeting was never blocked.
