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In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Stephanie Grisham, one of the longest-serving and longest-serving advisers to former President Donald Trump, said she regrets allowing a culture of dishonesty to the White House.
“You talk about this cultural culture of occasional dishonesty in the White House, so you were, as a press secretary, even though you weren’t informed, allowing that culture, weren’t you?” Stephanopoulos asked Grisham on Good Morning America on Monday morning.
Grisham, whose revealing new book “I’ll answer your questions now” came out this week, replied, “Yes, I was. And I thought about it and I regret it. Especially now when I look at it, and So a lot of people are pushing the false electoral narrative. I want now, in any way I can, to educate the public about behavior in the White House, because it looks like they’re going to try to run in 2024. “
Stephanopoulos challenged Grisham, who served most of Trump’s four-year White House term before resigning after the Jan.6 uprising on Capitol Hill, asking him, “But you stayed until the last two weeks … what took you so long? “
“Yes, that’s a fair question and it’s a complicated question,” Grisham replied, adding that she was initially drawn to Trump’s ability to draw large crowds and his support among Republicans. But she said when she joined the West Wing she “started to see what it really looked like and I immediately regretted that decision.”
The former president responded forcefully to the latest revealing book from a close former ally, with Melania Trump’s office saying in a statement: “The author is desperately trying to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation by manipulating and distorting the truth about Ms. Trump . Mrs. Grisham is a deceptive and troubled person who does not deserve anyone’s trust. “
Grisham, who also told Stephanopoulos it was the former president who told her not to hold briefings during her tenure, said she was unsure if she could have done more to protect a young employee than ‘she writes in her new book Trump had developed an “unusual interest” in and “behaved inappropriately” towards.
“Should you have done more to protect her?” Stephanopoulos pressed.
Grisham replied: “I don’t know if I could have, there is, there is no human resources department in the White House”, before Stephanopoulos pushed back and suggested that she could have bring the issue to the White House chief of staff.
“I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Mark Meadows,” Grisham replied. “I don’t think he would have done anything. So I did my best, in terms of never leaving her alone with him in the cabin. I tried to keep her from traveling so often. as possible. I did the best I could, I think, in this environment. “
Another major theme of the book is the former president’s infatuation with the dictators of the world. Grisham remembers how the former president tried to get closer to Russian Vladimir Putin during a trip abroad for the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.
“How do you explain why the president was so appeased towards President Putin?” »Asked Stephanopoulos. Grisham said that, in his opinion, “I had a feeling he wanted to impress the dictators, I think he almost admired how tough they were.”
While other top aides resigned or were forced to leave, some even spoke out against Trump while he was still in office, Grisham has supported the president for most of the Trump administration’s four-year tenure , through a lot of controversy – and when asked Monday by Stephanopoulos if it was a mistake to work for President Trump, she quickly replied, “Yes.”
“Why do it?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“I believe he gave voice to a lot of people who felt left out,” Grisham said. “But I think a lot of us, including me, walked into this White House and got heavy with power and… we didn’t think about serving the country anymore, it was about survival.”
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