Former White House press secretary reveals Donald Trump’s terrifying character

Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, perhaps most famous for never doing a TV report with journalists, is due to publish a book next week in which counts everything.

The acusa al presidente donald trump abusing his staff, appeasing dictators like Russian Vladimir Putin and making sexual comments about a young White House employee.

En su libro, titulado I will answer your questions now (Now I will answer your questions), Grisham remembers his time working for a president who, he said, I constantly berated her and he made outlandish demands, including to appear in the press and reenact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Trump’s (first) impeachment – a task he managed to avoid.

“I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to say something in public that was not true, or that make me crazy “Grisham writes, giving a reason he never gave press sessions.

After being a press secretary, Grisham worked in Melania Trump’s office. He resigned on January 6 when a horde of Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol.

His book was kept a secret from his closest allies in the White House, although by the time he left Washington that number had declined. (He writes that, months before the election, he had moved to Kansas.) His publisher, HarperCollins, described the book as “The most candid and intimate portrait of Trump’s White House.”

The former president and his advisers have already rallied to discredit Grisham’s account, and have used increasingly personal terms to denigrate her.

“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and it was obvious from the start, ”Trump said in a statement Tuesday. He accused her of becoming “angry and bitter” after a breakup. “She was having big problems and we thought she should fix those problems on her own. Now, like everyone else, he receives a payment from a radical left editorial saying bad and false things ”.

In his book, Grisham offered an anticipatory response to critics: “By the way, this is not a book where they have to like me.”

Here are some notable paragraphs obtained by The New York Times: A hard (fleeting) stance towards Putin was only part of the show.

Grisham touches on a well-researched topic when exploring Trump’s call for dictators. Although he says Trump went astray to please one in particular: Putin, who had a cold welcome to Trump, and he writes that the president seemed to want to impress him even more.

With all the talk about sanctions against Russia for interference in the 2016 election and various human rights violations, Trump told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m going to be a little harder on you for a few minutes. But that’s for the cameras, and after they’re gone, we’ll talk. You understand'”, Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.

During this meeting, Grisham listened to Fiona Hill, Trump’s senior adviser on Russia, who later became an impeachment witness, who observed what she said were Putin’s subtle efforts to induce Trump. In error.

“At the start of the meeting, Fiona Hill leaned towards me and asked if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very pretty brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face and a magnificent figure,” writes Grisham. “He told me he suspected that the woman had been chosen by Putin specifically to distract our president. “

Sexist language towards women

While in the White House, Trump’s targets included a young publicist Grisham says the president repeatedly invited to board his Air Force One cabin, including once to “look” at her, using a curse to describe her butt. Trump, he writes, ordered her to promote the woman and “keep her happy.” Instead, Grisham tried to drive him away from the President.

In a spiel in the Oval Room about E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s, Trump first insults Carroll’s appearance. She then looks Grisham in the eye and says something that puzzles her.

“’You just have to deny it,” he told Grisham.. “It’s what you do in all situations. Okay, Stephanie? You just denied it, ”he repeated, emphasizing the words. “

Grisham also confirms what she and Melania Trump had long denied: that the first lady got angry after various reports about the her husband’s infidelities -and the payments of money in exchange for silence- were revealed in the media.

On the contrary: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the accusations that followed other women,” Grisham writes, “I felt like Mrs. Trump was basically on a rampage.”

The first lady, she said, found ways to omit her husband from the photos and tweets, and insisted on appearing on the arm of a handsome military aide. Melania Trump, who closes even with her closest associates, begins to open up to Grisham, telling him that she does not believe the denials of her husband or those of her former fixer, Michael Cohen.

“Oh please, are you kidding me?”he asks at one point. “I do not believe it”, adds the first lady, using an insult. (This book, it must be said, contains many swear words.)

Grisham is also trying to clarify why Melania Trump was wearing a jacket with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care, Do U? when he visited a camp for migrant children in Texas, although he focused more on the president’s reaction: “What were they thinking? “ he asked Grisham and his wife in the Oval Room, before ordering an assistant to tweet, “Tell them you are talking to the media,” he told the group.

The first lady fell asleep over time, writes Grisham, to the point of falling asleep on election night. On January 6, I was supervising some pictures of a carpet and declined to comment publicly on what was happening on Capitol Hill. (For Grisham, it was the last straw: he resigned that day.)

In the end, the first lady sided with her husband, doubting the election results. “Something bad has happened,” he told Grisham – and refused to invite Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, to tea at the White House.

“He always said, ‘Let me think about it’ or ‘Let’s see what the West Wing does,'” Grisham wrote, “which meant no.” And when, exactly, did you decide to start following the West Wing’s lead? White House press deportation request Grisham says a trip to North Korea inspired Trump to ask him to investigate ways to permanently expel the press from the boardroom James S. Brady .

“I investigated different places where we could locate them, other than the press room. Whenever the President asked me about my progress in this matter, I let him know that I continued to work on the options “, write Grisham.

As she tries to please Trump, whose media coverage has been relentlessly negative, she describes her anger towards herself and others as “creepy”“When I started to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock effects or cameras,” he wrote, “I started to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”

He says one of the frequent targets of Trump’s wrath was Pat Cipollone, who served as an adviser to the White House: “He didn’t like being told that the things he wanted to do were contrary to the ethical or illegal. So he yelled at them. But then used to listen. And then he was yelling at them again. “

There were other indignities: Grisham writes that Trump called her aboard Air Force One to defend your penis size after Daniels cursed him in an interview. “Yes sir,” Grisham replied.

At one point, he writes, Trump managers appointed an unidentified White House official known as “Music Man” to perform his favorite show tunes, including Memory of the Cats, to get him out of the brink of anger.

The assistant, it is later revealed, is Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She doesn’t identify him, but it is Max Miller, a former White House official who is now running for Congress with Trump’s backing.

She was a close observer of Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia – though she doesn’t name the procedure – because, she reasoned, even temporarily attributing the power to the vice-president would have been “show weakness. “

In the end, Grisham stayed clear of the resignation of three chiefs of staff, two press officers and countless other assistants. He notes that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her son-in-law, appeared to be gaining more power.

Melania Trump, she says, insisted on attending meetings where she shouldn’t, even though she demanded that her father address the nation from the Oval Room during the early days of the pandemic. But Grisham reserves a special anger for Kushner, which he calls “Rasputin in a tight suit”.

“The truth is, almost everyone ended up wearing the president down,” Grisham writes. “We were bottles of milk with an expiration date.”

Former press secretary agrees: “I should have spoken more”