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

by Stephanie Grisham

I know all of this, because that is what we did to everyone else who decided to tell their truth or who stood up against things they thought were wrong. It is what I did, personally, to many people because it is the Trump formula: when you’re in, you’re in, and when you’re out—you’re denied and then destroyed.

It broke me. I took a breath and waited another minute. You learned to do that in the Trump White House: make sure you are grounded and not acting out of the moment.

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.

I liked them and I disliked them and I miss them and I hope I never see them again.

I think Trump always wanted a better relationship with the press but didn’t know how to get it, as he had done so easily in his Apprentice days.

It was a master class in television production, and he was a natural producer. It was also the world he knew best, a sort of Celebrity Apprentice situation but for actual cabinet secretaries, and the press ate it up. Fundamentally, Trump wanted to impress reporters. Maybe, he seemed to think, they would start to write good things about him again.

That was my first lesson that these guys played for keeps.

I stayed in New York, not knowing what to do and getting no direction. It was another lesson of Trump World: just do what you want to and hope it works out.

Trump allies grumbled about having too many “RNC people” moving into the White House (especially because the RNC had basically left Trump for dead after the Access Hollywood scandal),

We were all placed in different lines to receive briefings, security badges, access badges, laptops, and cell phones and be fingerprinted. It was fascinating to watch and be part of the process that was the White House Military Office onboarding hundreds of people in order to keep the government running.

More than once I found myself angry that the creators of the TV series The West Wing hadn’t done better research. As an avid watcher of the show, I blamed them for my unrealistic expectations. All of us got lost constantly; trying to find power outlets and light switches was comical; the bathrooms were a mystery to me, and no matter how many times I stumbled upon them, I could not remember how to find my way back.

Trump always wanted to see how far you would go to do his bidding; it was his way of measuring your loyalty. And it was hard when you were caught in the middle of something like that to keep your bearings.

This was in reference to demanding people lie for him.

A big part of why he won was his commitment to cutting through bureaucracy, running his affairs like a successful business, and bucking tradition. The only problem with that plan was exactly what made the campaign so great: it was too small, and it broke too many norms. 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.

I don’t think many of the senior officials had a clue about any of that, and that really hurt the administration from the start. Because we had alienated so many of the “normal” Republicans in Washington, a lot of them were either unwilling to join the administration or were put on some do-not-hire list by someone in Trump World.

In his vocabulary, there was no higher compliment than being “tough” or “vicious” or “a killer.”

I’d actually have to look at a list to remember who they all were—a blur of mostly middle-aged white dudes whose ultimate influence proved to be fleeting, to be honest. That was Trump’s cabinet.

Finally I recognized and respected her no-bullshit attitude. She didn’t need to waste time being fake to people, and she made no apologies for it.

Kellyanne Conway is one of the strongest and most cunning people I know. Words are her weapons, and she is a master at the art of verbal gunslinging.

He was skilled at making people feel important and as if their ideas mattered.

Anyone with a brain in the White House instantly knew that Jared and Ivanka were the real power players, the people to be reckoned with, the ones you didn’t want to cross.

and most notoriously Infrastructure Week. I say most notoriously because every time we told the press corps that we planned to focus on infrastructure, Trump would tweet something bonkers or some scandal or miniscandal would break or the president would undercut whatever message we were sending. “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke inside the White House, one we even shared with the press,

A necessary perk of being a part of senior staff meant having the ability to go to the medical unit to schedule doctor appointments at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, get medical advice or prescriptions, or just request aspirin. Part of the unit’s job was to keep the people closest to the first family healthy, because that was best for them and the country.

graciously refused to make me feel awkward.

Interesting wording from the author.

I watched for more than four years the way that in any moment, the Trump family was able to convince the world that any problem was due to “everyone else” and they were never to blame.

The host of Celebrity Apprentice was held to a different standard by the press than a president or a first lady is. It’s a totally different dynamic, and it took a long time—a very long time—for the Trumps to understand that. Maybe they never did.

Political press isn't Entertainment press

She preferred to react to what we said than for us to react to her.

On one occasion, I came across him at Bedminster after he’d kicked out a White House staff member so he could take her room. 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.”

Lindsey Graham.

The entire time we were in Washington, the only place they ate outside the White House, as far as I can remember, was the Trump Hotel.

In the years ahead, foreign leaders such as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French president Emmanuel Macron would learn that all they had to do was call the president directly if they didn’t like the negotiations that had been done ahead of time by the advance teams. In order to ensure that the president would attend certain events, they’d make the requests personally, and President Trump would almost always agree. Every time that happened, it caused chaos for the operations, military, and Secret Service teams, but the president didn’t care about the packed schedule or the lack of assets such as cars and helicopters—until we got there. Then he would see all the stuff he had randomly agreed to and how complicated it was and complain that the schedule was “inhumane.”

For those who care to know, Mrs. Trump “slapped” her husband’s hand away that day because she thought it was against protocol to hold hands at such a formal ceremony. Melania was a rule follower, sometimes to a fault, and her husband knew that. He often tried to hold her hand or messed with her hands on purpose in front of the cameras to irritate her. I found it amusing, but the press never seemed to like that explanation, even when I offered it.

So for those keeping score, not seven months into the Trump administration, we’d already had two chiefs of staff, two homeland security secretaries, three communications directors, two press secretaries, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Mrs. Trump saw the violence in Charlottesville for what it was—vicious racism—and she decided quickly to issue a statement condemning it. She also did not like the “very fine people” comments at all and tried to show her husband by example what he should do. It was too bad she didn’t do that more often.

“If this were me, I’d be having a hard time right now.” She just shrugged, though. “This is Donald’s problem,” she told me. “He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.” I marveled at that kind of attitude, still do. Because it is completely correct—when a person cheats, it is his or her own problem, nothing that the other person did.

I am just speculating, but it seemed that she was more angry at being what she perceived as humiliated in the press than at the news itself.

Mrs. Trump could not control her husband and truly had only the best intentions for children. But nobody seemed to care about that.

As the family separations increased, they received a whole new level of coverage, and Mrs. Trump noticed it immediately. She monitored the news daily, so she always knew what was going on, and she was very unhappy with the images of children crying or being taken from their parents. Morally and politically, it didn’t sit well with her.

Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system.

“I wore the jacket to go on the plane and off the plane. And it was for the people and for the”—she paused to find the phrase since it was not one that came naturally to her—“left-wing media who are criticizing me. And I want to show them that I don’t care. You could criticize, whatever you want to say, but it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”

we visited the Cape Coast Castle, one of around forty “slave castles” that had served as prisons for slaves en route to the Americas. We were greeted by a tour guide, who walked Mrs. Trump through many rooms and told stories of how the slave trade had begun. We were shown a room that had held hundreds of men and women, with tiny windows that barely let in light. There was a small ditch dug down the middle of the room, maybe six inches deep and wide, and it was explained to us that it had been used as a bathroom. Each room was horrible, and the tour guide was brilliant in the way he told us the grim and heartbreaking story of the way the people kept there had lived. And when I say brilliant, I mean that he told it in a way that we almost lived it—we felt their pain, their misery, almost understood what it must have been like to be treated as cattle. The thought that human beings were held in such horrific conditions until they were placed on ships in the middle of the night, only to live in even worse conditions until they arrived at their destination, was hard to stomach. There were rooms for the women that were equally as brutal. We stopped at an altar to pay tribute to all those who had lost their lives and those who had lived under such cruel circumstances. I remember feeling distinctly ashamed that that had ever been allowed to happen and about our country’s complicity, since so many of the people had been shipped to the United States. Mrs. Trump felt deeply impacted a...

While at the school in Malawi, the children had kept asking us to take photos of them on our phones so that they could see what they looked like. Suffice it to say, we were all surprised that many people there did not own mirrors and so the children literally didn’t know what they looked like. As soon as we returned to the United States, she wanted us to send full-length mirrors to the school. “We need to send the school mirrors. Children need to know what they look like and see that they are very strong or very beautiful.” She was insistent that the children should be able to look at themselves and know their self-worth.

We took a safari tour before heading to the Nest, an orphanage in Nairobi. It is an incredible place that not only houses orphaned children but also provides facilities for mothers who have been incarcerated. They provide skills training for the women so they can provide for themselves and their children, then do all they can to reunite them. As I had been on the preadvance, I knew what a special place it was and was looking forward to seeing the babies again. Mrs. Trump glowed. She was kind, empathetic, and caring, asking questions like “How long do they stay?” “What do they eat?” “How are you funded?” and what the rate of reunification with mothers was. She eagerly showed the newborns as much physical affection as she could and was visibly impacted by some of their stories.

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. All anyone had to do to launch such an attack was mention inappropriate behavior to an allied senior staff person and an investigation was opened, which in turn could cost the person accused his or her security clearance or even job. The outcome of the investigation was often beside the point. Just being “under investigation” hurt your reputation inside and outside the building.

In fact, this book may be the first and only time anyone has told President Trump that a corpse and a dog flew inside Air Force One, at the same time, on his watch.

Referring to the tradition of AF1 bringing body and families to DC. This was Bush Sr's funeral.

In an administration careening from crisis to crisis, the best way to look good was to be seen as putting out fires—even if you’d lit them yourself.

Contrary to what most everyone believes, the job of press secretary isn’t just giving briefings on TV. You are on call 24/7 to the president of the United States as well as by the press corps, which is not a small group of people who keep it to one question per day. You need to know what is happening in the news at all times, and you are constantly on the phone with heads of agencies, trying to figure stories out. In addition, the press secretary oversees a team of around ten people and is expected to attend most every meeting in the building.

No wonder Jen Psaki doesn't want to do the job long term!

the president was his own spokesperson, and he always thought he could do the job better than anyone else.

Stephanie and Melania thought so as well. His own best spokesman part.

I was up front that I would still want to work for Mrs. Trump. Not only did I like the job and had grown comfortable in the role, I had a stupid-ass idea in my head that I’d be able to change the president’s mind on things or do things differently because he would know I had a direct line to his wife.

Spoiler: she was wrong.

The president sometimes liked it when I referred to his wife as the boss—I think he found it amusing in a way.

“You know everyone likes you,” he said. “I was frankly surprised by that.” I laughed. He continued, “No, seriously, everyone I have spoken to about you likes you. There’s usually always one or two people who have something bad to say about a person for a job like this, but not you. Everyone just loves you.” I wasn’t completely sure that was true, but it was nice of him to say so. So I thanked him profusely and said I’d try not to let any of them down. Then he uttered something that was pure Donald Trump. “They don’t matter,” he said. “Only me.” I laughed awkwardly, but he wasn’t kidding.

The media. Where do I begin? It is not my intention to use this book to trash the press, nor is it to defend some of our administration’s behaviors and actions against them. Truth be told, I think both parties were at fault for many things—including putting out misinformation.