Stephanie Grisham, former White House press secretary under Donald Trump and chief of staff to then First Lady Melania Trump, began her book tour on Monday with an appearance on Good Morning America, and host George Stephanopoulos started off with the “inevitable first question, what took you so long?”
Grisham resigned on January 6, the day of the Capitol siege, but her new book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, to be published on Tuesday, is a scathing portrait of the Trump White House. While the pre-publication publicity has included all sorts of bombshell revelations through the years that Grisham was a loyal aide to the Trumps, she stayed.
“That’s a fair question, and that’s a complicated question,” Grisham said. “I went into the Trump campaign a true believe and a true loyalist.” She added that she didn’t see the full measure of the chaos of Trump White House when, in July, 2019, she shifted from the East Wing, where she was the first lady’s communications director, to the West Wing, where she became press secretary.
“When I went to the West Wing I started to see what it was really like, and I regretted that decision,” Grisham said.
Grisham’s book already has been met with attacks from her former boss, Melanie Trump, along with the former president’s allies, but it’s also a source of skepticism from Trump’s detractors, wary of efforts by former White House staffers to rehabilitate their image.
Stephanopoulos asked her if, by staying, she was enabling a “culture of casual dishonesty” in the White House.
“Yes, I was, and I have reflected on that and I regret that, and especially now watching him and so many people push the false election narrative, I now want to, in whatever way I can, educate the public about the behaviors within the White House, because it does look like he is going to try to run in 2024,” she said.
Stephanopoulos himself is no stranger to the post-White House memoir, having written his own, All Too Human, after departing the Clinton administration in 1996. It, too, created a bit of a stir, albeit it’s hardly an apples to apples comparison. Grisham’s book is a gallery of unflattering details about the First Family, with claims that Trump used lewd and sexist language and that the first lady was nicknamed “Rapunzel” by the Secret Service because she confined herself to the residence. The former president has characterized the book as “lies,” but the book also details the president’s tendency to “just deny it,” as she writes he ones told her.
In the interview, Grisham addressed one aspect of her legacy: She never held an official press briefing, hence the title of her book. She said that it was Trump who ordered her not to hold one.
“When we discussed me taking the job, he had already suspended the briefings for about six months under Sarah [Sanders, her predecessor],” Grisham said. “He said he didn’t think we needed any more briefings. He spoke…
Read More: Stephanie Grisham Says She Regrets Tenure Under Donald Trump –