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

by Stephanie Grisham

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.

If Fauci was a master at playing the outside game with the press, Birx was better at the inside game. She knew how to tell the president what he wanted to hear or at least give him news in the way he preferred to hear it.

After decades and multiple administrations, of course Fauci has learned how to deal with the media. She really tried to paint him as only being into his own press.

Secretary Mnuchin kept raising the potential impact on the economy. He felt that the recommendation to shut down the borders was far too severe and the financial impact to our country and the world would be something we would not recover from for years. The discussion got quite heated, especially between the secretary and National Security Advisor O’Brien, who at one point said to Mnuchin, “You are going to be the reason this pandemic never goes away.”

In my mind I kept saying “This is not a reality TV show. We cannot address the nation with a bunch of mumbo jumbo just so he looks presidential. That’s not how this works.” This was some serious shit, and all they were thinking about was TV and image and optics. But as I say, that was just in my head.

People were afraid to stand up to them and I have to admit I was one of them. Trump let that state of affairs go on all the time.

What struck me in that meeting was that Jared, who was sitting next to the vice president of the United States, commandeered the meeting and was calling all the shots.

Meeting was about dealing with COVID messaging.

Ivanka was also doing her “my father” this and “my father” that routine, making it impossible for staff members to argue a contrary view.

Meeting was about dealing with COVID messaging.

Unable to do the basics of my job, I felt helpless and demoralized. And the more I thought about it, the more outraged I grew at Jared’s behavior. He was not an expert on any of those things—shutting down borders, the economic consequences, the health consequences—yet he alone seemed to be deciding our first actions to address one of the most devastating crises in our nation’s history.

I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared. She didn’t disagree with me.

We were now thirty minutes away from what might be the most important speech of the Trump presidency, a speech that could determine his reelection, and it was still being written. There was no time for fact-checking, vetting, or notifying friends and allies on the Hill or abroad. There was hardly any time for the president to read it and make changes to it. It was a total clusterfuck from start to finish because Ivanka and her crew wanted her father to be on TV.

As I observed him, I noticed a familiar pattern to how he operated. He would call people into his office, tell them what a great job they were doing, how much the president liked them, and then cut them out. He stopped people from hiring anyone he didn’t approve of. He exiled people he didn’t know to the Siberia of the Executive Office Building and then pretended he was doing what he could to bring them back. It was sadistic mind fucks 24/7.

Mark Meadows

He went on for a few more minutes of general ranting about how no one who worked for him was any good, he needed fighters, and we were failures.

Jared Kushner wasn’t happy. Those were words you never wanted to hear in the Trump White House.

Jared, who had appointed himself the expert on every problem—from the border wall to trade policy to an unprecedented global pandemic—suddenly claimed that he’d had nothing to do with the mess that was made.

That sort of thing never happened in a usual White House, but of course, we weren’t dealing with the usual. We often flouted the rules anyway.

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.

“Bless your heart,” by the way, is known as a nice way to say “Fuck you” in the South.

When I say there was a reality TV show mentality to our administration, I’m not kidding.

Meadows would bring in his favorite “Trump whisperers” to either calm the president down or give him pick-me-ups. They included familiar staples such as Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and congressmen Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz. We all knew that whenever Trump needed someone to defend him on TV on anything, Gaetz was our boy. He would do anything for Trump and a TV hit—though not necessarily in that order.

of course, the upcoming election influenced every decision Trump made about the pandemic. He had an almost mystical belief that his “base” would miraculously propel him to victory just like it had in 2016.

Trump seemed increasingly prone to delusion and conspiracy, and it looked to me that Mark Meadows was milking that for all it was worth. Why? Probably because that was how he stayed in power.

One of them told him that he could not wear a mask in public because it would show weakness and piss off the base, and everyone else blindly agreed. Because they probably knew what he wanted to hear, they encouraged him to be tough, which meant not showing empathy for the millions of people who were sick or afraid.

There was someone who was trying to get the right thing said but was being overridden with this and I've forgotten who, I'm sorry.

Trump could have used his own trip to the hospital to demystify the need for such a procedure and encourage others to have it done. In doing so, perhaps he could have saved lives. But as with covid, he was too wrapped up in his own ego and his own delusions about his invincibility.

I didn't look it up but she says that Dubya also had it done and was public about it.

“Oh, this really hit him hard,” Trump said. “He’s really upset.” “That’s bullshit,” I replied, my temper flaring. You know, maybe I didn’t need to get into it with the president of the United States, but if he had asked how I was in bed, I could at least give him the down low on what my relationship with his new buddy had really been like. “He was terrible to me,” I said. “He cheated on me and lied to me.”

She's talking about Music Man. From earlier in the book.

“Put her on TV. Keep her happy, promote her” Trump would tell me. He even said that to her. “Do you want to be on TV? You’d be great on TV, a real star,” which of course is the highest compliment in the Trump universe.

This was a subordinate of hers that was very pretty and getting a LOT of attention plus requests for personal meetings from DT. She tried to keep space between them to protect her.

I got a call afterward relaying that the president had said, “Let’s bring her up here and look at her ass.” After that, I tried to keep her off trips. I didn’t want to punish her for something that as far as I knew she had no part in. But I also knew I needed to protect her and, frankly, the president as well.

Being with my family and far away from the swamp that is DC was just what the doctor ordered. I played games with my family and slept a lot, Ben was able to run around in a big yard, and I ate home-cooked meals every day. I began to understand why people remove themselves from situations to regain perspective and appreciate things they have been neglecting.

When it came to matters such as national security and the first family’s safety, there was never a chance in hell that I would give the press the slightest bit of information.

the president was apparently furious. He felt that the image of his going to the bunker made him look weak or afraid—and he hated the very thought of some left-wing protestors taking satisfaction over making him run scared, no matter that it was the decision of the Secret Service. To Trump, as I’ve stated many times, there is nothing worse than being made to look “weak,” and he denied that he had gone there for his safety, saying that he had gone for an “inspection,” which was just not true.

WHENEVER WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS undertook a hunt for the leaker of one story or another, the leaker was rarely found. But the search was often used as a pretext to get rid of people they didn’t like.

But after covid, my quarantine, my breakup, my very public job change, and the bullshit with the new West Wing chief, I had zero fucks left to give over Mark Meadows and his mean-spirited (and amateurish) maneuverings.

I was checked out. That was true. A person can deal with the pile-on of hatred for only so long. I should have checked my pride and giant ego at the door and left when Meadows started.

She said her usual “Let me think about it,” which meant no. Like her husband, she didn’t like to go places that were far away.

As the walls were closing in on her husband’s presidency and with the pandemic upending everyone’s lives and freeing her of most of her official obligations, Mrs. Trump seemed to retreat further and further into her own interests and priorities, which included making photo albums of every holiday, major event, and special moment.

In terms of the president, who had been taken to the hospital, she related only that he was bored there.

I had a strong feeling we were going to lose the 2020 election. I say this as someone who had been one of the few who was convinced that Trump would win in 2016. But this time was different. It wasn’t our lackadaisical and confusing response to covid that convinced me. It wasn’t Joe Biden. Long before the pandemic struck, I saw things going against us. I had a feeling that the election wasn’t going to be about policy this time around. I just figured that people had become tired of all the controversies and scandals and Trump’s offensive tweets and statements. In short, I thought Trump had exhausted everyone.

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.

I do remember that a couple of days later, she was talking about Biden’s acceptance speech and how she was being criticized for not standing next to Trump as Jill had stood next to Biden on election night. She said, “I don’t stand next to him because I don’t need to hold him up like she does. Can you imagine?” That made me laugh.

personal. I don’t understand it.” What I also found unbelievably cruel was the way that suicide, mental health, drinking, and addiction problems were being lobbed to reporters so casually and in such a way as to humiliate, not help, me. What if I had actually been struggling with addiction or was suicidal? For an administration that had worked so hard on issues of addiction and mental health, it was an irony I still feel disgusted by.

Background: Meadows turned a caring accident into a suicide attempt and despite promising that the accident wouldn't get out, press members told her that Meadows was trying hard to leak it to them. They all declined because they believed her. It's not worth describing the "incident" except that I also believe it.

I’m not sure what I expected, and it was a good ego check to be sure, because at the end of the day, I was nothing more than a means to an end, and when I lost my value, I was not worth shielding.

repeatedly claimed. At least not at first. Before the ballots were even cast, he had telegraphed that he was going to claim voter fraud if he lost. So I wasn’t shocked, even if I was disappointed, that he started doing the voter fraud thing that first night.

BUT AT SOME POINT in December, I think Mrs. Trump saw where it was all heading and started packing up things. And as I touched on previously, she put her photographer on overtime duty to assemble a bunch of albums. I was horrified by the hours the photographer was billing, since I had to approve them, and the Office of Administration kept questioning me about them. To make it worse, I never did see the albums. But the photos were, I suppose, a source of comfort to the first lady.

You get inside the walls of the White House, the most important building in the country and arguably the world, and you are catered to like nowhere else. You go in wanting to help the people of the United States, but I don’t think many people in the Trump administration left there as the best versions of themselves; I know I did not.

when you work in a Hunger Games–style environment like that, another instinct takes over: instead of focusing on getting productive work done, you just want to survive. So you do whatever you have to do to make that happen, including making compromises with yourself and your morality that don’t sit well with you. I was guilty of that, too.

President Trump gave a voice for many people who felt forgotten or unheard. But what started out as a positive change in the status quo has descended into a frenzy of anger and violence.

The president loved to tweet something and then see how quickly it ended up all over the media. “Watch this, kids,” he would say. Here we are laughing at one of the million times this happened.

At the pyramids, I told Mrs. Trump that she really needed to gaggle with the press. She said she wished people would talk about what she did rather than what she wore, although right after that she stood in front of the Great Sphinx and started posing like a model. Old habits die hard.