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October 6 - October 10, 2021
Because nothing in the Trump campaign ever resembled an ordinary campaign or even made sense most of the time,
let alone followed a clear plan or had a coherent message or strategy, we were kind of all thrown into the logistical shit show together, feeling our way in the dark.
He had said nutty, batshit things for decades, after all, and reporters had laughed or brushed them aside. Not anymore.
Most of them clearly leaned left politically and seemed almost to consider the fact that Donald Trump was now president a bizarre joke.
He expected and demanded that you say certain things regardless of whether they were true or not.
“Infrastructure Week” became a running joke inside the White House, one we even shared with the press, a sign of the constant turmoil and chaos that would forever prevent us from doing a single damn thing we planned to do on a given day.
So from the very start Mrs. Trump struggled to grasp why I could not tell reporters what to say or to write. I tried to explain that that would be propaganda, but my explanations only frustrated her.
Senator Freeloader was sitting at a table by the pool, a big grin on his face, lapping up the goodies he was getting like some potentate. He said to me, with a creepy little smile, “Isn’t this great? Man, this is the life.” I remember thinking “Yes, it is, but it’s not your life—it’s the president’s life.”
“I saw you were about to cry, so I had to stop looking at you because I knew I would cry,” she said. “And we needed to be strong for the children.” That was probably the only time Mrs. Trump ever spoke with me about her capacity to feel deep emotion, and I was both surprised and relieved to know she had it in her.
Apparently the thing had cost $51,500, and after all the visits and trips we had been on, including to the little boy who’d received a heart transplant, that was the big story.
This was our story now, and it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t true. Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system.
But that is the job of the spokesperson: take the lumps in the press, and do all you can to make your principal look good, even if it means that you look inept or simply as though you’re a liar.
As I would come to learn later on, two things were often weaponized and used against people in the Trump administration, even if there was no reason: the security clearance process and the launch of internal investigations. Either could be deadly to a person’s reputation, and the news of them often leaked to sympathetic reporters in the press.
Don’t forget, that is how a lot of people would rid themselves of perceived enemies inside the Administration, they simply leaked things to the press—true or not—then made sure the president saw the stories.
His mood could change on a dime, and his anger was swift, loud, jarring, vicious, and not always just.
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.
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.
But the president was as stubborn as his wife and never wanted to concede anything to the press.
Trump didn’t seem to be a big fan of European leaders in general.
He said many times that nuclear war was his biggest worry. “Forget climate change,” he once told me. “What we have to worry about is the bomb.”
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.”
We generally slow walked or ignored the president and very rarely did exactly what he asked.
The president, as he did often when referring to John Bolton, pointed at him and said, “There he is. Congrats. Except he wants to attack every country in the world. You don’t want Bolton, he’ll use you as a target.” I wasn’t sure what the “congrats” was referring to, but I could tell that Bolton didn’t love the rest of the statement.
The president and first lady were both angry with me when there was no press in the intensive care unit in Ohio to capture all of the medical staff clapping and cheering for them and taking selfies. I tried to explain that we weren’t allowed to have the press in areas where there were patients, for both privacy and concerns over keeping the environment as sterile as possible.
They said that Trump’s visit had been a publicity stunt and had done nothing to heal the community.
“Where the hell are our people? Why are those two on TV right now and there is no one to defend me? Why are you even on this plane? What do I have a whole team of people for if there is no one fucking defending me? And I am stuck on this fucking airplane and can’t do anything!”
If I had done what he wanted—gone back to the reporters on a day when we all should have been focused on shooting victims and their families to say, “Hey, guys, just want you to know the hospital staff really loved President Trump”—they would have made a fool out of him, and of me.
No one was covered in blood, as Trump had said, which became another terrible story about the president’s lies.
As his press secretary, I accept responsibility for my role in this normalization because it was my job to deny, deflect, or play down his comments to the press. Maybe, too, I was just too deep into the spin at that point myself.
I started to wonder what part I was playing in normalizing his behavior and the future of our party. What was worse, was I also sacrificing my own integrity and betraying my moral compass? Probably yes.
Nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to in the Trump White House, so on one level it shouldn’t have been surprising.
The real problem, of course, was that even if we assembled the finest communicators in the land and put together talking points that would make Rachel Maddow proclaim Trump’s innocence, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; Trump would go out and tweet whatever he wanted, or he’d let Rudy Giuliani go say something bonkers.
He called Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell “a dirty bastard, that motherfucker” and even complained about the ethanol lobby. “There is no one more difficult than these ethanol people,” he said, before adding “aside from the Palestinians.” And it wasn’t just Trump who seemed to be coming unglued.
She constantly made it clear both in public and probably in private that she thought he was borderline insane and a danger to the nation.
“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.”
“To suggest that a man like Kelly was ‘unequipped to handle the genius’ of Trump is not just proof that Grisham is hooked on the president’s Kool-Aid. It’s proof that she’s ODed.”
He added, “And if I lose even one brain cell, we’re fucked.”
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.
Trump, Ivanka, and Jared were the ones calling most of the shots in the White House, but they wouldn’t blame themselves when things were fucked up.
If there was a scale of awfulness in the Trump White House, with five being the most terrible person around, I’d give Mark Meadows a twelve.
He also put a stop to every pay raise and title change and promotion I had lined up for members of my staff but didn’t bother to tell any of them.
It never occurred to me that Mrs. Trump would ever cut me off like that. My ego was too big; I assumed that I was different, too important. No one would do something like that to me.
When the president needed someone to tell him how awesome he was, the staff would get Gaetz on the line and he’d sing for his supper.
At the very least he might have encouraged more people to take covid seriously, wear a mask, and thus saved lives.
In my mind, our administration had become about one man and who was or wasn’t loyal to him.
Looking back, no matter the ire it would have caused or the reactions within the White House, I should have had the guts to speak up about things I thought were wrong, even if it would have made my time in the administration shorter. I was weak not to do that, and because of my fear, I didn’t serve the country well, which is my biggest regret of all.
But today, being a constitutional conservative doesn’t seem to be enough to be a “good Republican”; what seems to matter today is blind loyalty to an ex-president who still won’t admit he lost. No matter the party, we should be loyal to this country, not to any one man or woman. It saddens me to see so many Republicans allowing one man to have the perceived power to rule our party; that is called an autocracy and that is not how this country was founded.
