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

by Stephanie Grisham

The endless attacks on Trump actually had the opposite effect from what the more partisan critics may have hoped for: it became impossible to keep up with it all. We became hardened to it. It all started to fall on deaf ears.

At the White House, Trump was the distant, erratic father we all wanted to please. I tended to forgive his sins, forget his foibles, believe that he was better than outsiders were saying he was.

Corporate America was not going to welcome someone from the Trump White House with open arms. The Trumps were all I had. At least that was what I believed for a long time. So I stayed and endured and tried to make the best of it. Many of us did. And we saw what happened.

Not going to lie, it thrilled me that during one of his most important speeches up to that point in the administration, the president of the United States was wearing my makeup.

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

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.

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.

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?”

Sarah and Hogan called me into her office to ask if I was pursuing the job. I let them know that if it was offered to me, I would have to seriously consider it. Hogan said he obviously would be honored to have the job, but if it wasn’t him, he’d want it to be me—and I said I felt the same. Sarah let us know that she was supportive of both of us. Looking back, that was probably the most adult and professional meeting I ever attended in my four years at the White House.