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

by Stephanie Grisham

January 6 was a truly devastating day for the country, but looking back now, it was bound to happen. All of it. The insurrection and my resignation.

I think the first part is obvious: I became heady with power. I got cocky. 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.

Second, 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.

I also turned a blind eye toward my own falling into a trap I saw over and over again: believing I was a trusted and valued member of Trump World. The plain truth is that most of the Trump family dismisses and cuts people from their lives on a whim. They demand total loyalty, but they are loyal to no one. I don’t blame them, to be honest. They are businesspeople, and business should not be personal.

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.