I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House

by Stephanie Grisham

I imagined myself standing behind the podium, with its presidential seal, and filling their shoes on matters of national and even international scale.

Well that didn't happen.

prescient.

In the same sense that predicting water will run downhill is prescient.

Once we got into office, we were overwhelmed by the size and scope of the federal government and how many professionals it takes to run it.

As I had never been to any of those countries, I was excited and felt privileged to be along for the ride. I thought there would be no better way to experience it than via Air Force One and in the safety of motorcades and secure hotels.

Not going to lie, it thrilled me that during one of his most important speeches up to that point in the administration, the president of the United States was wearing my makeup.

What ensued can only be described as a version of The Apprentice: White House Edition.

Being a (relatively) normal person with close access to the most powerful person on the planet, I did what I felt anyone in my position would do: I repeatedly begged him to tell me if UFOs were real.

He smiled and hung up. Then, instead of handing the guy’s phone back to him, he dropped it on the ground without a word and walked off. He had that side to him that I might even call sweet. At least that was how I wanted to see it then.

His mood could change on a dime, and his anger was swift, loud, jarring, vicious, and not always just.

There was almost never a moment in the Trump White House when the press secretary disseminated information to the public and the press reported it without controversy. Maybe that was our fault, maybe it was their fault, maybe it was both our faults, but in my opinion the briefings weren’t doing what they were intended to do.

Disinformation = disseminate information Trump World euphemism.

Of course, there was another, more self-serving, reason that I was reluctant to do press briefings: 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.

Putin responded to Trump’s comment calmly. He never seemed to be charmed by Trump or even impressed by him. If anything, the Russian seemed to look down on him. I can only imagine that must have irritated Trump, making him want to earn Putin’s respect even more. Putin probably knew all that. He was an old KGB guy and renowned as a master of head games. And Trump was a very easy mark. It struck me that Trump seemed to really want to impress Putin. And I think Putin knew that.

I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I know that I began to feel trapped. Because however much I agreed with the president’s policies and hated the unfair attacks by the Democrats and some in the media, 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.

the expectation to be “tough” or “completely loyal” to one man created a lonely feeling in me because it was never talked about, just an unspoken expectation. In fact, there was an evening around that time when I watched Bohemian Rhapsody, and a line in the movie really hit home. Toward the end, Freddie Mercury says, “Do you know when you’ve gone rotten, really rotten? Fruit flies. Dirty little fruit flies, coming to feast on what’s left.” The quote encapsulated how I was feeling at that point: not great about the choices I’d made, the things I’d stayed quiet about, and some of the people I was surrounding myself with.

An address to the nation is serious stuff, and whenever possible you need plenty of time to prepare properly—unless, of course, you were in the Trump White House, where everything was like a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks.

When I say there was a reality TV show mentality to our administration, I’m not kidding. And I am ashamed to say that I lost sight of what I was there to do—serve the country—more than once. That was life with Donald Trump.