Chris Whipple is Still Covering the White House
Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris Whipple is an Emmy award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, author, and political analyst. A former CBS 60 Minutes producer, Whipple is also the EP and writer of the Discovery Channel documentary series “The Presidents’ Gatekeepers” and the Showtime Network documentary series “The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs”. Whipple continued his research on these topics in two of his books and is the author of four New York Times best-sellers including: Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, and The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House. Whipple has also written for Vanity Fair, Politico, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. Notably, Whipple wrote the two-part 2025 Vanity Fair profile on the second Trump presidency and White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:06.7 | This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from IHeart Radio. |
| 0:13.3 | In today's world of endless scrolling and 24-hour news cycles, it's rare for any one piece of journalism to become culturally relevant. |
| 0:23.0 | But that is precisely what happened to a piece written by my guest today. |
| 0:28.3 | Chris Whipple's groundbreaking profile of White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, |
| 0:33.5 | became one of Vanity Fair's most read stories of 2025. |
| 0:38.5 | The piece was debated constantly on TV news, |
| 0:42.0 | and photos of Wiles and her staff from the article |
| 0:44.8 | were shared across the internet for weeks. |
| 0:48.2 | Along with his work for Vanity Fair, |
| 0:50.8 | Chris Whipple is an Emmy award-winning journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. |
| 0:56.2 | Described as, quote, an indispensable observer of American power, unquote, |
| 1:01.8 | Whipple has written for publications such as Politico and The Daily Beast. He's also |
| 1:07.0 | authored four nonfiction books on American politics and government. Working in so many |
| 1:13.2 | different mediums, I wanted to know what Whipple considers himself to be. A little bit of |
| 1:18.9 | all of the above, I guess. I have clearly, I've got some kind of identity crisis going on. I stumbled |
| 1:25.1 | into this latest phase of my career writing books about political history, |
| 1:31.1 | and it happened with a phone call out of the blue from a couple of French brothers named Jules and Jules |
| 1:38.3 | and Judeo Noday, who had done the iconic documentary 9-11. They almost died that day. They said, Chris, we have this crazy idea. |
| 1:47.2 | We want to do a documentary about White House Chiefs of Staff. And I thought about that for about |
| 1:51.7 | 30 seconds. And I said, I'm in. So they produced the documentary, what you did for Discovery? |
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