Yet another book about the Trump White House, by Press Sec'y Stephanie Grisham

[lpetrich]

Stephanie Grisham Book Craziest Details on Trump White House

Stephanie Grisham served as both White House Communications Director and Press Secretary for former President Donald Trump. Her ringside seat as a primary player in the administration gave her a perfect view of the disarray and “clown show” as she called it, which she has collected in an upcoming book I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, set for release Oct. 5.

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“When I worked for the first lady in the East Wing, we had all come to call Jared and Ivanka “the interns” because they represented in our minds obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls,” she writes. “Mrs. Trump found that nickname amusing and occasionally used it herself. Now, during one of the most important crises to hit the country in a century, the interns were behaving true to form.”

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Trump refused a month-long Vegan diet to raise money for Veterans for fear it would mess with his brain.

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Grisham called Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic a “clown car on fire” … but impossibly worse.

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Grisham has little regard for Kushner and suggests he may have been advising Trump in his own best interest.

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Trump did NOT want to immediately ban travel from China and worried too much was initially being made by Covid.

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Despite no experience, Ivanka played a lead role in a critical meeting of how to address the pandemic:

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It is fair to say Grisham has mixed emotions about working for the Trump White House, which she described as such:

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Trump reportedly insisted — without irony — that he needed a P.T. Barnum as his spokesman

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These are just a few of the fascinating details revealed in the excerpt of the book. Yes, there have been scads of behind-the-scenes tell-all books about the Trump White House, but none from the perspective of the once-loyal Grisham, who only now, when it benefits her financially, is willing to tell a different story. Read the full excerpt here.

 

[Tigers!]

The publishers and book sellers must be very happy with all those titles coming out.

 

[lpetrich]

How Jared and Ivanka Hijacked the White House’s Covid Response - POLITICO

Working as Trump’s spokesperson was like sitting in a beautiful office while a sprinkler system pours water down on you every second and ruins everything on your desk — except in this case the water took the form of tweets and words and statements. I can give you endless metaphors to describe the Trump White House from a press person’s perspective — living in a house that was always on fire or in an insane asylum where you couldn’t tell the difference between the patients and the attendants or on a roller coaster that never stopped — but trust me, it was a hot mess 24/7. How people did the job without going crazy was a question in itself. Maybe none of us did. Trump, by the way, never understood that he usually was the one screwing up the messaging. Instead, he would complain to me, “I need a P. T. Barnum!” as his spokesman, just as he would always say, “I need a James Baker!” whenever he was complaining about his current chief of staff. By P. T. Barnum, I think he meant a communications whiz who could somehow charm reporters into writing whatever he wanted them to write. But maybe he just meant he wanted some expert con man. After all, P. T. Barnum’s most famous line was “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Unable to do the basics of my job, I felt helpless and demoralized. And the more I thought about it, the more outraged I grew at Jared’s behavior. He was not an expert on any of those things — shutting down borders, the economic consequences, the health consequences — yet he alone seemed to be deciding the nation’s first actions to address one of the most devastating crises in our history. After he wrote the speech, there was no time for fact-checking, vetting, or notifying friends and allies on the Hill or abroad. There was hardly any time for the president to read it and make changes to it. It was a total clusterfuck from start to finish because Ivanka and her crew wanted her father to be on TV. And of course the speech that night contained a number of misstatements and sloppy wording — some caused by the president stumbling over a few phrases — that sowed confusion about such things as which countries would be affected by the new travel restrictions and if international trade would be banned. News outlets all over the world picked up on the discrepancies in the speech. People from various federal agencies started to call and ask us how to explain or clean up some of the things that had been said. Once again a line of reporters formed outside my office. Of course, it was our problem, not Jared’s or Ivanka’s or Hope’s. No, they were in the dining room off of the Oval Office, Trump’s usual hangout, congratulating themselves and telling the president how awesome he was.

I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared. She didn’t disagree with me. It was my fervent opinion that his arrogance and presumption had grown over the years, and he threw his power about with absolutely no shame. I would venture to say that being in the White House changed Jared as a person. There was no reason that he should be sitting with the speechwriter laying out our nation’s plan to fight a global pandemic. And I knew that if things went badly with the speech, which felt inevitable, he would be the first person to say in the president’s ear that the comms team had fucked it all up. He was Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.

 

[lpetrich]

Melania Trump Attacks Stephanie Grisham in Statement

The office of former First Lady Melania Trump released a statement blasting her former chief of staff Stephanie Grisham over a new tell-all book.

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A statement provided by the office of Melania Trump said: “The intent behind this book is obvious. It is an attempt to redeem herself after a poor performance as press secretary, failed personal relationships, and unprofessional behavior in the White House. Through mistruth and betrayal, she seeks to gain relevance and money at the expense of Mrs. Trump.” (Her mention of “failed personal relationships” appears likely to be a reference to Grisham’s past relationship with former Trump aide MAX MILLER. Citing three people familiar with the incident, POLITICO Magazine reported in July that the relationship “ended when he pushed her against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.” He denied the allegation.)

Seems like she's firmly in support of her husband.

 

[lpetrich]

Stephanie Grisham compares Melania Trump to Marie Antoinette in book

Grisham writes that Melania Trump was “Dismissive. Defeated. Detached,” according to Playbook. While a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Melania Trump was “preparing for a photo shoot of a rug she had selected” and declined to tweet Grisham’s suggestion that Americans have the right to peaceful protest but not “lawlessness and violence.”

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Grisham also wrote that while she tried to persuade Melania Trump that the 2020 election was not stolen from her husband, the then-first lady told her “something bad happened” with the results.

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When Stephanie Winston Wolkoff wrote her "Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady" in August 2020, Grisham, acting as Melania Trump's chief of staff, derided the author and her book, calling it "an exercise in bizarre twisting of the truth and misguided blame for the sake of self-pity."

In November 2019, she called the anonymous author of a book about the Trump administration a "coward" and dismissed the book "A Warning" as a "work of fiction," according to The Washington Post.

Stephanie Grisham Destroyed John Bolton's Book as Sell Out - Mediaite

During a multi-segment appearance on CNN’s New Day, she confessed to enabling what she called the “toxic” goings-on at the Trump White House, which she admitted cost lives. She also admitted that she feels that she harmed democracy by supporting baseless allegations of voter fraud in 2020.

She also derided Fox News for mindlessly amplifying Trump’s stolen election claims, which she argued encouraged the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. She specifically called out former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.

“You know, I looked forward to going and doing Lou Dobbs because Lou Dobbs would do all the talking about how great everything was, and I would just nod and say yes,” Grisham said, adding that Fox hosts “by and large, didn’t get tough with us. They just took what we were saying and disseminated it.”

But her reaction was very different to John Bolton's own tell-all book. JB was Trump's national security advisor 2018 Apr - 2019 Sep.

“John Bolton, the president’s former national security advisor writing a book. A tell-all, if you will. I’ve never heard of such a thing, no one I know has ever heard of it. What a rancid, corrupt, absolutely disgusting move for him to have made,” the Fox Business host blustered to Grisham

Dobbs later cited the disappointment in Bolton expressed by former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz. “He is obviously so profoundly disappointed in John Bolton, as frankly are most of us, who at one time thought he was a man of principle,” Dobbs stated, referring to Fleitz and himself who once saw Bolton as an ally.

“I agree with him,” Grisham averred. “How much does it cost to sell out potential national security in your country?”

Does that mean that she herself is only doing it for the money?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The publishers and book sellers must be very happy with all those titles coming out.

I'm curious, who would keep buying these books. Woodward fine, but all of the rats selling books, after a while, it is the same story, that we already knew for the most part. This guy should never have run for President, forget actually be it and as such, ran it like we thought he would.

I have no interest in reading any of these. Living through it was bad enough, especially with the fear in the back of my head saying this idiot could win in 2024!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Melania Trump Attacks Stephanie Grisham in Statement

The office of former First Lady Melania Trump released a statement blasting her former chief of staff Stephanie Grisham over a new tell-all book.

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A statement provided by the office of Melania Trump said: “The intent behind this book is obvious. It is an attempt to redeem herself after a poor performance as press secretary, failed personal relationships, and unprofessional behavior in the White House. Through mistruth and betrayal, she seeks to gain relevance and money at the expense of Mrs. Trump.” (Her mention of “failed personal relationships” appears likely to be a reference to Grisham’s past relationship with former Trump aide MAX MILLER. Citing three people familiar with the incident, POLITICO Magazine reported in July that the relationship “ended when he pushed her against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.” He denied the allegation.)

Seems like she's firmly in support of her husband.

Yeah, sure... Melania gives a fuck what anyone in DC thinks. That should read "Office of Melania Trump attacks..."

 

[lpetrich]

Stephanie Grisham Can’t Stop Lying for Trump

Trump’s former spokesperson promises to reveal the truth behind the lies in “I’ll Take Your Questions Now” but seems unable to sift fact from fiction in her own memories.

Stephanie Grisham, who spent four years lying to reporters on behalf of Donald and Melania Trump, promises readers of her new memoir, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” that she’s ready to tell the unvarnished truth.

Or at least, the truth as she remembers it. Grisham, who served in a variety of White House roles as chief spokesperson for both the president and the first lady, told New York magazine that because she had not been planning a tell-all book before she quit the White House on January 6, she did not keep a diary and wrote entirely from memory.

Unfortunately, while much of what Grisham writes about the Trumps’ off-screen behavior rings true, her account of what she witnessed in the Trump White House is riddled with factual errors and what appear to be trace elements of cover stories she invented for the press that eventually lodged themselves in her memory, displacing in her mind the contrary evidence of her own eyes and ears.

We know this because several of the events Grisham describes in her memoir unfolded in public and were documented in still photographs, on video, and in White House transcripts. By examining that evidence, we can see that at least a half-dozen of the stories Grisham recounts include details that are either incorrect or invented.

The article continued with details on those stories.

 

[lpetrich]

Perhaps the clearest example of this is Grisham’s new account of what came to be known as “Sharpiegate,” when, on September 4, 2019, Trump called reporters into the Oval Office and held up a weather map which he had altered with a black marker, presenting it as proof that he had been right, and the National Weather Service wrong, when he warned residents of Alabama earlier that week that they were in the likely path of Hurricane Dorian.

Grisham tries to convince readers of her memoir that the whole event was more about incompetence than dishonesty.

Seems to me that Trump was unwilling to accept that he was mistaken about that.

Grisham even attributes her failure to hold a single press briefing during her tenure as White House press secretary to her fear of ending up, like her former boss Sean Spicer, satirized on “Saturday Night Live” as a hapless liar. If she appeared on the briefing room’s stage, Grisham writes, “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.”

What did she expect?

(Grisham fails to mention that she had already been caught lying for Trump in a way that made her seem ridiculous in 2018, when she defended his delusional claim that he had “predicted” the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum during a visit to his Scottish golf course the day before the vote. In fact, as contemporary news reports, and date-stamped tweets from both Trump and Grisham that day make clear, Trump actually arrived in Scotland the morning after the referendum. Grisham completely omits this episode from her memoir.)

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Other parts of Grisham’s memoir that distort the historical record suggest that while she did get what she calls a “front-row seat” to watch history unfold inside the Trump White House, some of what she observed failed to make a clear enough impression on her for her to even accurately remember basic details.

One example of this is Grisham’s recollection of watching Trump try to impress President Xi Jinping of China by bragging about “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen,” over dessert at Mar-a-Lago during an April 2017 visit, “while talking about a missile strike on Syria he’d launched the week before.” But, as Trump told Maria Bartiromo a few days later, the missile strike, in retaliation for a Syrian government chemical attack, was carried out during the dinner that night.

Then after one of Trump's temper tantrums,

What is truly bizarre about Grisham’s faulty account of this incident is that, even with the benefit of hindsight, she still seems unable to admit that Trump’s deranged tantrum was not an understandable reaction to unfair criticism by his political opponents but evidence of a dangerously unstable narcissist who was never fit for the job she spent more than four years helping him pretend he was capable of doing.