Stephanie Grisham’s book was kept a secret from
her closest allies in the White House.
Stephanie Grisham’s book was kept a secret from her
closest allies in the White House.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Katie
Rogers
By Katie
Rogers
Published
Sept. 28, 2021
Updated
Sept. 29, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/us/politics/stephanie-grishams-book-trump.html
WASHINGTON
— Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary perhaps best
known for never holding a televised briefing with reporters, plans to release a
tell-all book next week that accuses President Donald J. Trump of abusing his
staff, placating dictators like Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and making sexual
comments about a young White House aide.
In her
book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Ms. Grisham recalls her time
working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish
requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and
re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Mr. Trump’s
(first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid.
“I knew
that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something
that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic,” Ms. Grisham
writes, offering a reason for why she never held a briefing.
After
serving as press secretary, Ms. Grisham worked in Melania Trump’s office. She
resigned on Jan. 6 as a horde of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Her book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House, though
by the time she departed Washington that number had dwindled. (She writes that,
months before the election, she had moved to Kansas.) Her publisher,
HarperCollins, calls the book “The most frank and intimate portrait of the
Trump White House yet.”
The former
president and his advisers have already moved to discredit Ms. Grisham’s
account, and have used increasingly personal terms to disparage her.
“Stephanie
didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” Mr. Trump
said in a statement on Tuesday. He said she had become “very angry and bitter”
after a breakup. “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out
those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical
left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
In her
book, Ms. Grisham offered a pre-emptive response to the criticism: “This is
not, by the way, a book where you need to like me.”
Here are
some highlights from the manuscript obtained by The New York Times:
A
(fleetingly) tough stance toward Putin is just for show
Ms. Grisham
lands on a well-documented theme when she explores Mr. Trump’s love of
dictators. But she says Mr. Trump went out of his way to please one in
particular: Mr. Putin, whose cold reception of Mr. Trump, she writes, seemed to
make the president want to impress him even more.
“With all
the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and
for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m going to act a
little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after
they leave we’ll talk. You understand,’” Ms. Grisham writes, recalling a
meeting between the two leaders during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.
During that
meeting, Ms. Grisham listened to Fiona Hill, Mr. Trump’s top adviser on Russia
who later became an impeachment witness, who observed what she said were Mr.
Putin’s subtle efforts to throw Mr. Trump off guard.
“As the
meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s
translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty
face, and a wonderful figure,” Ms. Grisham writes. “She proceeded to tell me
that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to
distract our president.”
Sexist
language toward women
While he
was in the White House, Mr. Trump’s targets included a young press aide whom
Ms. Grisham says the president repeatedly invited up to his Air Force One
cabin, including once to “look at her,” using an expletive to describe her rear
end. Mr. Trump, she writes, instructed her to promote the woman and “keep her
happy.” Instead, Ms. Grisham tried to keep her away from the president.
During an
Oval Office rant about E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her
in the 1990s, Mr. Trump first insults Ms. Carroll’s looks. Then he gazes into
Ms. Grisham’s eyes and says something that unnerves her.
“‘You just
deny it,’” he told Ms. Grisham. ‘That’s what you do in every situation. Right,
Stephanie? You just deny it,’ he repeated, emphasizing the words.”
Melania
Trump’s quiet rebellion
Ms. Grisham
also confirms what she and Melania Trump had long denied: That the first lady
was angry after several reports of her husband’s infidelities — and hush money
payments — surfaced in the news media.
To the
contrary: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the allegations that
followed from other women,” Ms. Grisham writes, “I felt that Mrs. Trump was
basically unleashed.”
The first
lady, she says, found ways to omit her husband from photos and tweets, and made
it a point to show up on the arm of a handsome military aide. Mrs. Trump, who
is closed off to even her closest aides, begins to open up to Ms. Grisham,
telling her that she doesn’t believe her husband’s denials or those from his
former fixer, Michael Cohen — “Oh, please, are you kidding me?” she asks at one
point. “I don’t believe any of that,” the first lady adds, using an expletive.
(This book, it should be said, contains a lot of expletives.)
Ms. Grisham
also attempts to illuminate why Mrs. Trump wore a jacket inscribed with the
phrase “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” to visit a Texas camp for child migrants,
but focuses more on the president’s reaction: “What the hell were you thinking?”
he asked Ms. Grisham and his wife in the Oval Office, before instructing an
aide to tweet out a cover story: “You just tell them you were talking to the”
news media, he told the group.
The first
lady grew more disengaged over time, Ms. Grisham writes, to the point where she
was asleep on election night. She was overseeing a photo shoot of a rug on Jan.
6 and declined to comment publicly on what was happening at the Capitol. (For
Ms. Grisham, this was the last straw. She resigned later that day.)
In the end,
the first lady sided with her husband, doubting the election results —
“Something bad happened,” she told Ms. Grisham — and declined to invite Jill
Biden, the incoming first lady, to the White House for tea.
“She would
always say, ‘Let me think about it’ or ‘Let’s see what the West Wing will do,’”
Ms. Grisham writes, “Which meant no. And when exactly did she decide to start
following the West Wing’s lead?”
Demands to
evict the press from the White House
Ms. Grisham
says that a trip to North Korea inspired Mr. Trump to ask her to research ways
the press could be permanently evicted from the James S. Brady Briefing Room.
“I
researched different places we could put them other than the press briefing
room. Each time the president asked me about my progress on the matter, I let
him know I was still working on options,” Ms. Grisham writes.
As she
tries to please Mr. Trump, whose press coverage was relentlessly negative, she
describes his anger toward her and others as “terrifying”: “When I began to see
how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras,” she writes, “I
began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”
She says
one frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire was Pat Cipollone, who served as White
House counsel: “He didn’t like them telling him that things he wanted to do
were unethical or illegal. So he’d scream at them. But then he’d usually
listen. And then yell at them again later.”
(There were
other indignities: Ms. Grisham writes that Mr. Trump called her while aboard
Air Force One to defend the size of his penis after Ms. Daniels insulted it in
an interview. “Uh, yes sir,” Ms. Grisham replied.)
At one
point, she writes, Mr. Trump’s handlers designated an unnamed White House
official known as the “Music Man” to play him his favorite show tunes,
including “Memory” from “Cats,” to pull him from the brink of rage. (The aide,
it is revealed later, is Ms. Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She does not identify him,
but it is Max Miller, a former White House official now running for Congress
with Mr. Trump’s support.)
She was a
close-up observer of Mr. Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in
which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia — though she
doesn’t name the procedure — because, she reasons, even temporarily assigning
power to the vice president would have been “showing weakness.”
In the end,
Ms. Grisham stood by as three chiefs of staff, two press secretaries, and
countless other aides resigned. She notes that Ivanka Trump, the president’s
daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, seemed to grow more powerful.
Ms. Trump,
she said, made it a point to insert herself into meetings where she did not
belong, including when she demanded that her father address the nation from the
Oval Office during the early days of the pandemic. But Ms. Grisham reserves
special ire for Mr. Kushner, whom she calls “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.”
(At one point, Mr. Trump warns her not to get on Mr. Kushner’s bad side.)
“The truth
was that pretty much everyone eventually wore out their welcome with the
president,” Ms. Grisham writes. “We were bottles of milk with expiration
dates.”
The former
press secretary adds, “I should have spoken up more.”
Katie
Rogers is a White House correspondent, covering life in the Biden
administration, Washington culture and domestic policy. She joined The
Times in 2014. @katierogers
