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

by Stephanie Grisham

Don’t ever regret knowing someone in your life. Good people will give you happiness, bad people will give you experience, while the worst people will give you a lesson and the best people will always give you memories. —Author Unknown

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. —ATTRIBUTED TO C.S. LEWIS

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.

“Stockholm Syndrome is what it is when you begin to identify with your captors—they get nicer every day that they don’t kill you.”

Have the humility to learn from those around you. —JOHN C. MAXWELL

Chaos, when left alone, tends to multiply. —STEPHEN HAWKING

Forcing Sean to claim that the inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, which I imagine Sean also knew was bullshit, was a test. Trump always wanted to see how far you would go to do his bidding; it was his way of measuring your loyalty.

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

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.

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.

Say yes to unexpected opportunities—even if it scares you. —TORY BURCH

Let’s just go and not come back for a while. —UNKNOWN

Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown. —ANTHONY BOURDAIN

One must be strict, even in the little things. —JAMES BOSWELL

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.

When a storm is coming, all other birds seek shelter. The eagle alone avoids the storm by flying above it. —UNKNOWN

THE DRAMA OVER TRUMP’S “other women” never really went away. On February 16, Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker published a story that focused on “catch and kill,” which is a common practice in which a tabloid pays someone for the exclusive rights to a story and then never publishes it. Farrow talked about Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, who had allegedly fallen victim to the practice after she’d claimed to have had a long-term affair with President Trump from 2006 to 2007. Dylan Howard, a top executive of American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer, had allegedly paid McDougal $150,000 for her story in August 2016 and then buried it. If true, it was a classic catch and kill.

You cannot change the past, but you can always change your perspective. —WAYNE DYER

Trump’s first solo international trip was a big deal. Her chosen destination was probably unexpected. We chose to visit Africa in the fall of 2018 for many reasons. One of them was to try to soften public perceptions. The comments her husband had reportedly once made about African countries—calling them “shithole” countries—seemed to motivate the first lady to show that not everyone in the Trump family felt that way.

OUR VISIT TO MALAWI changed my life. It just did. It is a poor country but full of people who are so welcoming and do so much with so little. To this day I tell everyone that I would move there if I could. In fact, I told the president more than once that I wanted to be an ambassador there, which confused him every time I said it. “I would peg you as a European girl or just somewhere more elegant,” he’d reply. We had only one stop in Malawi, and that was to visit the Chipala Primary School. It was a school of roughly nine buildings, none of them with doors or windows. There were no desks in any of the buildings; instead, the children sat on the floor to learn. The school had so many children that there were not enough buildings, so many of the classes were held outside, with the children sitting in the red-brown dirt that got onto absolutely everything.

A good leader takes a little more of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. —ARNOLD H. GLASGOW

None are so empty as those who are full of themselves. —BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

Prince Charles followed her, and I was struck by how engaging he was. Well briefed, he knew I had worked for both the president and first lady and asked me, in his cultured accent, “How do you find time to do anything at all?” The president liked the queen a lot, but he was apparently not as big a fan of Charles. On the trip he and the first lady went to meet with him for a private tea. After Trump returned, he complained that the conversation had been terrible. “Nothing but climate change,” he groused, rolling his eyes. Mrs. Trump laughed and said of her husband, “Oh, yes, he was very bored.” She, on the other hand, had a lovely time.

The queen and Prince Philip sat at the head of the table, flanked by President and Mrs. Trump. There was some gossip later in the press about the queen’s choice of headgear for the evening, the Burmese ruby tiara. Vogue pointed out that the exquisite piece, according to the royal curators, was seen by the Burmese as having “prophylactic properties guarding the wearer not only against illness but also against evil.” That was interpreted by the press, naturally, as Her Majesty trying to ward off Trump’s evil.

Usually at these kinds of formal affairs, the conversation is stale and awkward—but not with Princess Michael. At seventy-four years of age, she was loud and lovely, eccentric but with a great sense of humor. She delighted in telling me repeatedly that she had never changed any of her children’s diapers, and she gossiped to me about Princess Diana, saying how vulnerable she had been and that she had been miserable in the marriage right from the start. She also told me that the royal family had never been welcoming to Diana, who had basically been there to provide an heir to the throne. As she was married to the queen’s first cousin, I kept wondering “Should she be telling me this?” She also spoke to me at length about her book, A Cheetah’s Tale, and we spoke about Africa before she turned back to the “tired nature of the monarchy.” At the end of the dinner, cherries were served as dessert, and I marveled at how elegantly the woman was able to take the pit out of her mouth and place it in a bowl.

I would discover at the after-dinner reception that Princess Michael was perhaps something of a black sheep in the family. Every time I was asked whom I had sat next to—including by Catherine, duchess of Cambridge, otherwise known as Kate Middleton—I was met with an odd look and a tentative “She is very interesting, isn’t she?”

Prince William and Kate both had a lovely sense of humor. I was wearing a headband that mimicked a tiara because I wanted to pay homage to their way of dress, something I had learned from Mrs. Trump. Kate complimented me on it, and I thanked her, saying “It’s certainly not as beautiful as the one you’re wearing,” to which she replied, “Yes, but it’s also not as heavy as this.” William chimed in with “I’m glad I’m not required to wear those things—though I’m not sure I have the hair required to keep i...

Prince Harry was also there, sans Meghan Markle, which surprised no one as she had made it very clear that she did not care for our president. He and I had met before, when Mrs. Trump had traveled to the Invictus Games, and we had a great conversation about that event. He joked with me about the “stuffiness” of the evening, which seemed to be a theme with everyone there. Of a...

Right before the dinner started, we were once again put into a line to greet Prince Charles and Camilla. When it was my turn to shake hands with Charles, I was delighted that he remembered me from day one, saying “Here you are again—have you managed any rest at all?” He was lovely and very personable, something that doesn’t come across when you see him on TV.

He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly. Yet somehow people crave his approval. —MIKE DUHAIME

And he was often in a rage about the press, his “unfair” coverage, how no one was ever on TV defending him, and various individual reporters. He really disliked many of them, especially CNN personalities such as Jim Acosta, Kaitlan Collins, and Jake Tapper, all of whom he felt were showboats who made up things to get more TV time.

Putin was handsome in a “power is an aphrodisiac” sort of way. Very confident. Very cool. Very unflappable. And it wasn’t as if there were a bunch of male models out there running the world to compare him to. I don’t know if it was because of all the media attention the US press gave him or the fact that he seemed to be proud to be an allegedly coldhearted killer, but I was fascinated by him.

With President Putin, Trump started out the same, then changed his tone. With all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand.”

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.

As the meeting progressed, I noticed Putin coughing on several occasions. Well, actually it was a little more subtle, more like small cough sounds accompanied by throat clearings. He did it so much that it became distracting to me. I thought to myself, “Dude, drink some of that damn water sitting in front of you!” Finally, I said something to Fiona about it, and she quickly replied, “He’s probably doing that on purpose—he knows full well the president doesn’t like germs.”

Every time he talked to the Turks or about Turkey, Trump had the same talking point: how they’d been screwed by Obama. Trump loved to order cabinet secretaries, staff, or whoever else was sitting near him to give this dictator or that whatever it was he wanted. I think he enjoyed seeing his own people squirm when he said things such as “Let’s give it to them. Let’s get it done. Now.” He would generally follow up with said dictator with a casual “If it doesn’t happen, you just call me, you don’t need to call the others, I will take care of it.”

But at one point he looked at the Turkish delegation and asked, out of the blue, “Have any of you seen Midnight Express? That’s a dark movie for you guys.”

Some people can’t function without negativity because bringing down others makes them feel better. —UNKNOWN

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. That was a reminder to me that no matter how close I might feel to the Trumps, I wasn’t family. And family trumped all.

The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome. —GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

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.

Trump had liked Dr. Fauci—for about ten minutes. Then he had decided, as most everyone in the White House did, that Fauci was a showboat who liked seeing his face on television. He hated the way Fauci always talked about worst-case scenarios and thought his statements scared people, hurting the economy and Trump’s reelection chances. Fauci would say, of course, that he was just telling the truth as he saw it. But he was also exceptionally savvy at handling the media, and they adored him.

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.

By the way, that was March 2020. No one was wearing a mask—not the president, not Fauci, not Birx. There was no social distancing. The subject didn’t even come up.

Birx, Fauci, and the other professionals in the room just watched all the nonsense without comment. To their credit, they pretty much kept straight faces, although I imagine they thought they were surrounded by lunatics.

the Brazilian government announced that the president’s press secretary, whom I’d spent time with, had tested positive for covid. Because my symptoms started to get worse, I was put into quarantine away from the White House, which set off a chain of events over the next three weeks that would change my life forever.

It’s so nice when toxic people stop talking to you. It’s like the trash took itself out. —UNKNOWN

On covid, Meadows and the whisperers nursed Trump’s worst instincts. 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. It is my belief that if Trump had behaved differently, if he had worked to soothe people’s fears and maybe even once shown his own vulnerability, he might have changed people’s impressions of him. At the very least he might have encouraged more people to take covid seriously, wear a mask, and thus saved lives.

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.

It was part exhaustion, part not giving a shit anymore, and a whole lot of self-preservation. I was operating under a veil of total paranoia and was disheartened by and disappointed in both the president and first lady. I was also grappling with the fact that my ego had gotten out of control enough for me to think that I was special in the Trump circle, and shocked by how far I had “fallen.”