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

by Stephanie Grisham

I had been with the Trump family almost from the beginning of their political crusade—maybe the only person in history who worked at the most senior levels at the same time for the president and his wife. I spent nearly every holiday with them and flew with them all over the world. I was with the boss in private meetings with foreign leaders where he would say the most bonkers things and also, to be fair, often fight hard for our country.

And let’s face it, somebody had to work in the Donald Trump White House. The president’s opponents don’t like this line of argument, but the administration was staffed by many dedicated people who, out of a sense of duty, were doing their best to make the government function under an inexperienced and unpredictable executive.

People don’t want to admit it now, but there was something refreshing about Donald Trump when he first arrived on the political scene, especially compared to all the other politicians, who were saying one predictable, poll-tested, lame thing after another. He was bold and poked at convention. He challenged dumb rules that people had just lived with for no reason. He said things people thought but never said. He took positions that no Republican had ever taken, including some shared by Bernie Sanders.

Every day, it seemed, brought a new revelation, a new scandal, a new accusation. Not all of them had equal weight. Not all of them were proven. Not all of them were true. The endless attacks on Trump actually had the opposite effect from what the more partisan critics may have hoped for: it became impossible to keep up with it all. We became hardened to it. It all started to fall on deaf ears. When you are buffeted by daily controversies and grievances and crises, and sometimes just false information, those who are fighting back tend to form a tight bond. I felt, in a way, part of a family of misfits who clung together, fighting against the established order. We had an imperfect leader at the top, and none of us wanted to see how imperfect he actually was. Just as his critics never wanted to give Trump credit for anything, we didn’t want to give any credit to the critics who hated us. Even when they were right.

When he liked you, when he was pleased with you, he overwhelmed you with charm and generosity and even affection. And when something set him off or someone else did, he’d start screaming. His temper was terrifying. And it could be directed at anyone, whether he or she deserved it or not.

the president frequently said insane things to foreign leaders. Sometimes they were just silly or offensive, sometimes they were offhand remarks that would inadvertently upend the carefully crafted policies of our diplomatic and national security professionals, sometimes they were sheer bluster. The point is, over time we all had grown numb to the broad range of things he said.

Maybe, too, I was just too deep into the spin at that point myself. We were operating in a state of siege mentality, conditioned to see the press as the enemy.

I was not like a vast majority of the “originals,” who didn’t have to worry about their finances.

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.

I think the president enjoyed the turmoil and the frenzied speculation—no matter how chaotic and uncertain it was for his own staff and, I don’t know, the country, even the world,

Couldn’t we keep the lid on the drama in the Trump administration for one damn day?

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.

Meetings just “happened” all the time in that White House. Random people would wander into the Oval Office and start talking about random things, and suddenly something would be decided or Trump would agree to do something—and anyone who wasn’t in the room would find out about it later on Twitter or on cable news.

imagine being a subject matter expert in the Trump administration and there was a meeting on your subject, something you knew more about than anyone else, something you’d slaved away for months on to come up with a coherent workable plan, and no one told you the meeting was happening while decisions were made by people with a tenth of your expertise on the subject. Well, welcome to the Trump White House. That’s how we rolled.

it finally dawned on me what was going on—it only took me three years. 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. No, the fault for plummeting poll numbers or bad press or confusing policies or the inability to keep some promise the president had made or some scandal always fell to the staff. And the solution was always to get rid of the person, aka the scapegoat, who was letting them down in favor of some new, temporarily perfect replacement—who

It was difficult to watch people who had been so loyal to the president and the administration be treated so poorly by the newest round of employees, who seemed loyal only to themselves.

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.

I didn’t want him to lose. I was a conservative who believed in many of the policies the administration put forward. I didn’t want my friends and colleagues to lose their jobs, and I was not on board with the plans Joe Biden had for our country.

It’s not as easy as saying “His tweets were too mean.” It’s not that black and white, and to this day I find it hard to explain. He hadn’t changed much in four years, and I was no longer sure that that was a good thing. He was still too often president of his base and not the country. That had been noble in the beginning, when he had truly been fighting for those who felt they had no voice, but after he was elected, I think his priorities should have expanded to include the entire country—even those who disagreed with him.

Being strong is important, but so is being honest and humble.

In my mind, our administration had become about one man and who was or wasn’t loyal to him. I feel that we lost sight of our country, and amid all the noise that was covered 24/7 by the media, the achievements of the administration were being largely ignored. Because of all that and more, I didn’t know if Donald Trump deserved reelection.

The scarier thing to think about, though, is the well-being and future of our country. I’ve been a Republican most of my life, and I’ve worked all my career to support constitutional and conservative values. 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.

To relieve Congresswoman Liz Cheney of her leadership role because she “continues to live in the past” while the forty-fifth president sends daily missives out about how the election was stolen is just batshit crazy to me. The Republican men in leadership claim to want to stay “on message” and look to the future, all the while they do whatever they can to stay on the good side of a man who is focused only on the past, on revenge, and on himself.

I believe that the Trump administration put into place many excellent policies that I hope will continue, but those are Republican policies, not Trump policies. He does not own them, and I firmly believe that we as a party can move them forward without the divisive, scandal-laden drama of the years we were in office. Simply put: the Republican Party is not one man.

Some on the right will say I’m a traitor, and some on the left will say it’s too little, too late because I willingly worked for a “monster.”