Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yet |

Donald Trump is unlikely to be watching. Grisham is not the first insider to break omertà on the Trumps, who rose from running a New York real estate empire to occupying the White House, but she may well be the politico who got closest of all.

A Republican operative before Trump seized the party, Grisham was spokeswoman and confidante to Melania Trump when she became first lady. Grisham shifted to the West Wing, becoming Trump’s third press secretary, then returned to the East Wing as Melania’s chief of staff. Shortly before the Trumps left the White House, on the day of the Capitol attack, she resigned.

Now she has written a book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now. The irony of the title has been widely noted. In nine months as press secretary, Grisham did not take questions at a single White House briefing. Nonetheless, the book has generated a slew of headlines, nearly all unflattering about her former bosses.

Stories range from the salacious, Trump calling a press aide forward on Air Force One in order to “look at her ass”, to the ludicrous, as when Trump and Boris Johnson used a G20 working breakfast to discuss the strength of kangaroos.

Grisham makes clear Trump’s unfitness to be president, whether due to his terrifying temper or his ridiculous demands – such as when, she says, he ordered her to finally go behind the White House podium, to defend him in his first impeachment by “acting out” his infamous phone call with the president of Ukraine.

Grisham avoided that humiliation, she writes, by getting “one of our most reliable ‘yes’ guys in the House”, Devin Nunes of California, to read the call into the congressional record. She also exposes decay higher up in the party. Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, is “gross and tacky … a snake”. Mitt Romney, Grisham’s former boss, a pillar of anti-Trump conservatives, is ridiculed for trying to become secretary of state.

Back down the food chain, Grisham does not name the White House aide with whom she had a relationship which ended in allegations of abuse, choosing to describe him as the “Music Man”, who she says could calm Trump down by playing his favourite songs, Memory from the musical Cats chief among them. The aide is widely known to be Max Miller, who denies Grisham’s allegations – and who is now a candidate for Congress in Ohio.

Trumpworld, of course, has lashed back. Peter Navarro, formerly a trade adviser and self-appointed White House enforcer, called Grisham’s book “useless gossip”. Trump claimed Grisham was being “paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things”.

Harper Collins – owned by Rupert Murdoch – will no doubt press…