If Trump wins in 2024 ‘he will be about revenge’, says former White

“He’s clearly the frontrunner in the Republican party,” Grisham told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday. “Everybody’s showing their fealty to him. He’s on his revenge tour, for people who dared to vote for impeachment.

“And I want to just warn people that once he takes office if he were to win, he doesn’t have to worry about reelection anymore. He will be about revenge, he will probably have some pretty draconian policies.”

As Grisham spoke, the Washington Post reported that Trump came close to announcing a 2024 run in August, only to be advised to hold off.

On Tuesday, Grisham, also formerly a close aide to Melania Trump, will publish a tell-all book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now. It has been widely trailed.

In a statement on Monday, Melania Trump said Grisham was “desperately trying to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation by manipulating and distorting the truth” and called Grisham “a deceitful and troubled individual who doesn’t deserve anyone’s trust”.

Grisham said: “I notice that she’s not denying anything fully in the book just yet. I think she knows that I have a lot of receipts to show that I’m being fully honest so I expected that, and I’m sure that there’ll be more to come, probably a lawsuit or two or three or four.”

Grisham was Donald Trump’s third press secretary of four, working for the first lady either side of that appointment.

She resigned as chief of staff to Melania Trump on 6 January this year, the day of the deadly attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, in support of his lies about electoral fraud.

In her book, Grisham cites Melania Trump’s refusal to try to stop the riot as the final straw.

Asked on ABC if she should have quit sooner, Grisham said: “Yeah, that’s a fair question, and it’s a complicated question. I went into the Trump campaign a true believer and a true loyalist.”

She also said she “spent a huge amount of time in the East Wing, and so I was almost shielded sometimes from a lot of the toxic nature of the West Wing in the administration. When I went to the West Wing is when I actually started to see what it was really like and I regretted that decision immediately”.

On the page, Grisham excoriates Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and other close Trump aides.

Asked on ABC why she did not do more to protect a young press aide she writes was subject to inappropriate attention by Trump, she said: “There’s not an HR department at the White House where you can go and say, ‘Hey, the president of the United States is acting inappropriately.

“I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Mark Meadows,” she said. “I don’t believe he would have…