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

by Stephanie Grisham

Between the two sides, our two press pools had already assembled, the only problem being that of the small group of North Korean press, only one was a “legit” member of the media, though I say that lightly because it is state-run media. The rest of the North Korean “reporters” were there solely to grab intel on both the South Koreans and us.

As I knew from having watched Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, there was no job in the administration that came under as much direct scrutiny by Trump as that of press secretary and director of communications. And his press coverage was all he seemed to care about most days. (It was usually terrible.) The job also, by its nature, would give me a lot of face time with him.

The president mentioned that I had a nice tan, and after I thanked him and explained that it was a spray tan, he asked, as if it was something he’d been thinking about for some time,

Wait... what? It was always makeup that made him orange??

he asked me to reach out to a prominent Trump supporter in Arizona. He wanted me to advise her to no longer wear sleeveless dresses and tops, saying they weren’t flattering to her and it wasn’t “a good look.” “You talk to her, though,” he said. “I can’t with MeToo and all.”

door to the bedroom in his cabin. The room was dark, since Mrs. Trump was sleeping (of course). Trump took the speaker, turned up “It’s a Man’s World” to the highest volume, and raised it over his head so that the music filled the bedroom. Although I was laughing, part of me thought, “Oh, shit, I do not want to be here if Mrs. Trump gets up.” She never did. He did it to be playful with his wife, not cruel, and she certainly didn’t take it otherwise.

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.

Everything about the West Wing was different from the East Wing: the schedule, the people, the way it was run. I also saw another side of the president, one I had heard of, maybe even seen on occasion—but never up close and so personal. His mood could change on a dime, and his anger was swift, loud, jarring, vicious, and not always just.

But when I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.

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.

We were still joking with the press about “Infrastructure Week,” as I mentioned earlier, because it was the perfect metaphor for a dysfunctional, broken, chaotic, and frankly crazy system. I could spend days carefully planning an announcement about a new administration initiative on opioids and then wake up at 4:00 a.m. to discover that the president had decided to get into a Twitter fight with Nancy Pelosi, threaten Iran, swear to impose sanctions on China, fire another cabinet member, or respond to some random book author’s attacking him (which would always, ironically, make the book a best seller).

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 ...

There wasn't much more to this. You got the gist.

Trump, by the way, never understood that he was the one screwi...

This was about him not understanding that he was causing the misfires in the west wing. People being told to do conflicting things.

the press briefings had been suspended via tweet, as the president had felt that the press was not being fair to him or to Sarah. In their view, the briefings had become vehicles for reporters to get face time on their networks by being as aggressive and confrontational as possible.

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. That was a lesson I’d learned early on, and I wasn’t about to do it unless totally necessary.

Is that what is happening with Liz Harrington of the proxy Trump Twitter account?

the press were granted access to the White House in the early 1900s. Decades later, President Nixon created a dedicated work space, which became the formal press briefing room. Eventually, small office spaces were given to members of the press corps, and the tents along the driveway of the North Lawn, also known as “pebble beach,” were allotted to the networks and cable channels so reporters could do live TV interviews with the White House in the background.

Trump’s fits of rage were swift, usually brief, but very intense. He had a capacity to find people’s weak spot, their vulnerability, and then turn it on them in an incredibly mean, savage, and often effective way. He thought that the worst thing you could be called was a loser or weak, so he deployed those words a lot. He thought that the way to get under the skin of people in the media was to claim that their ratings were bad.

The president said things like that to pretty much everyone. From my point of view, one frequent victim was White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. If you ever watched the TV show The Office, the boss on that show, Michael Scott, had a sworn enemy in the character Toby, the human resources rep who constantly told him what he couldn’t do. That was how Trump seemed to feel about the White House lawyers. He didn’t like them telling him that things he wanted to do were unethical or illegal. So he’d scream at them. But then he’d usually listen. And then yell at them again later.

It was another example of one or both of the Trumps’ not understanding or caring what it took to do a thing right with the media; they just expected it to be done.

So he ended up agreeing to call in the press and announced that we would be clearing the market of flavored e-cigarettes in the near future.

Seriously? There was no talk about science. It was going to be a political distraction. Cancel culture indeed. And then some!

The press jumped on that with the usual giddiness: Trump is lying! Trump is misinformed! Trump doesn’t know a map! To his detriment, the president refused to admit that the storm projections had changed or that he ever could be wrong. So he doubled down. Alabama was in the path of the storm, he insisted. That had been true—or potentially true—at one point in time. But the president was as stubborn as his wife and never wanted to concede anything to the press.

The board was from a prior meeting. Wasn't supposed to have still been there. I always assumed he drew it in front of the press? My take: Sounds plausible within scope of whole book. Jury's out and it doesn't mean anything in the end.

No reporter believed our explanations by that point. They believed that everyone around the president was a liar. It was yet another example of a fascinating interaction between Trump and the media; in my opinion both were wrong in the way they behaved, but neither cared. That created a toxic and in some ways twisted relationship between Trump and many of the reporters who covered him that in a weird way both hurt and benefited each side.

as always, the president proved to be his own worst enemy, refusing to admit any possible error on anything that might have killed the story before it ballooned and then using the latest media attacks on him to rally the support of his base.

That was what Trump did to anyone who left on unsatisfactory terms. It never occurred to him that perhaps that reflected on his hiring practices or that months before he had been singing their praises.

Once the press are dismissed from the room, the two leaders talk about the issues facing each country and concerns that either of them may have. Depending on the country, the meetings can be kind of boring for some, very productive, heated, or hilarious; usually with Trump it was more than one of those at a time.

Of French prime minister Emmanuel Macron, a trim, soft-spoken man, Trump scoffed, “He’s a wuss guy. He’s all of a hundred twenty pounds of fury.”

One of the funniest meetings was with British prime minister Boris Johnson, one of the few European leaders Trump seemed to tolerate. Conversations between those two, both pudgy white guys with crazy hair, redefined the word random.

he said of the Iranians, “They’re always trouble. They’re wired that way, perhaps.”

Trump seemed fixated on dictators, too. It almost seemed as if he admired their toughness and aggression, but he also was genuinely freaked out about nuclear war.

Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure. She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president. I was fascinated and from then on couldn’t stop watching for any interactions between the interpreter and President Trump. Sure enough, he addressed her directly a couple of times, jokingly and casually, but it was certainly nothing I had seen him do before.

Every time he talked to the Turks or about Turkey, Trump had the same talking point: how they’d been screwed by Obama.

He kept telling his staff to give them whatever they wanted. They conveniently never had time to do it. Thank goodness.

Another entertaining aspect of those meetings was that because the president got bored quickly, he would move on to different subjects, often using as a segue “Let’s talk about another subject, that is too unpleasant for me.” Or he’d say, “We can’t talk about trade now. Boring.”

Then the talk turned to the Nile River and a problem involving Ethiopians building a dam funded by the Chinese. Trump didn’t seem to understand the issue. Instead he turned the conversation to the Olympics. “This is why they win the gold,” he said, referring to the Ethiopians (I think). “They run up and down that river.”

The point is, over time we all had grown numb to the broad range of things he said. So when I read the transcript, placing his remarks to Zelensky on the sliding scale of Trump language, it didn’t rate very high in my opinion.

Regarding why the WH staff didn't act immediately.

Having worked for the Arizona attorney general years before, I fully understood the dynamic that was unfolding. Lawyers just want to win the case, and they are trained to be cautious about sharing information. Meanwhile, communications people want to win in the court of public opinion, which means giving people accurate and honest information but in a strategic way. Often, those two priorities clash, but there is usually time to negotiate a middle ground.

I think those who work in communications will sympathize with the fact that people always think they are experts on communications. They think it’s easy to “spin” the media and come up with the perfect statement and that they generally can do the job better than you can.

There was a time when everyone in the White House would have loved to be on Jared’s radar because it meant they mattered. But by now I had figured out that Jared Kushner at your door was sort of like a visit by the Grim Reaper—he always brought trouble and escaped without a scratch.

I reminded him that the president had made it clear that that was a nonstarter. He had told all of us that there should be no appearance of a team being put together, and no war room would be needed since he had done nothing wrong. In his mind, if we made a big, visible effort to defend him, he would look guilty.

“Let me take care of the president.” He loved to brag about how easily he could control his father-in-law, as though he were the ultimate Trump whisperer. I was like, whatever, dude. I don’t have time to deal with these daddy issues.

In my view Trump gave Jared basically unlimited power for one reason only: Ivanka. He probably didn’t want to tick off his baby girl.

FYI, there's very little about Ivanka herself. It's either Jared or Javanka. Also, there's very very little mention of Bannon and that's on purpose.

As much as I absolutely did not want to say it and it was certainly not in my voice at all, I was the spokesperson for the president of the United States, so in my mind it was my job to say what I had been told to say, word for word: “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.” Even thinking about that now, years later, I cover my eyes with shame. I’m sorry, General and Mrs. Kelly, that I didn’t have the nerve to say no. It is one of my biggest regrets.

“I appreciated your comment about John Kelly not understanding the genius of our president.” As if he didn’t remember that he had composed it in the first place. I gently tried to remind him of that, but he didn’t seem to care.

Not long before, a young boy started publicly challenging Trump to go vegan in TV ads and on highway billboards. At one point, I playfully asked him if he would ever consider doing that, since the challenge was for just one month and it would raise a lot of money for a good cause. I knew he loved his steaks and cheeseburgers, but one month didn’t seem that long. Trump’s response was swift, and his tone was very serious. “No, no. It messes with your body chemistry, your brain,” he said, referring to something he’d apparently heard about vegetarian diets. He added, “And if I lose even one brain cell, we’re fucked.”

Then Jared said, “Okay, but you should talk to Modi personally to tell him.” This showed just how well Jared had his father-in-law’s number because, like the rest of us, he knew that the president had a hard time saying no and that Modi would likely talk him into going.

Once we actually arrived in India, Jared and Ivanka (get ready to be surprised) inserted themselves into the visit to Gandhi’s ashram, something only the president, first lady, and Modi were supposed to take part in.

They also butted into the photo op at Wailing Wall.

As the number grew and grew, Trump still seemed resistant to doing anything too drastic. Contrary to what he would say later, he didn’t immediately want to ban travel to China. And he asked officials in the White House if we were making “too big a deal out of this.”

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

I had grown to really like Mick and his entire team. They were inclusive, fun, whip smart, and able to deal with the huge cast of crazy characters in our administration.

I spent the next twenty minutes in my room telling the press that I had no further details about Mick’s departure or replacement. Of course, most of them didn’t believe me, because they rightly assumed that a communications director/press secretary would know what was going on in the White House. That only compounded my own frustration about how little I knew on most days.

We had nothing new to announce, but that didn’t seem to matter to them, and I had been around long enough to know that there was no use trying to sway that particular group.

Hope, Jared and Pat C (lawyer)

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.