I'll Take Your Questions Now

What I Saw at the Trump White House

Stephanie Grisham, Evan Hollings

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780063142947
• eBook ISBN: 9780063142954
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

The most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet

Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016 to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family as Stephanie Grisham, and few had her unique insight into the turbulent four years of the administration, especially the personalities behind the headlines.

1

We Won—Now What?

Have the humility to learn from those around you.

—JOHN C. MAXWELL

I first officially met Donald Trump in a bathroom, only seconds away from disaster.

I was at the Iowa State Fair in the months ahead of the 2016 Iowa caucuses. We had been flying, then driving around the state for quite a while, I’d been drinking coffee after coffee to keep alert, and, well, I needed a bathroom ASAP. As soon as we arrived at the fairgrounds, I ran to the management office and the people there directed me down to the basement, where I found a very tiny bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a door with no lock.

As I was finishing up, I could hear a commotion outside but thought little of it as the enormous state fair was under way just above me. But as I was washing my hands, the noises got louder and suddenly the door swung open, bringing me face-to-face with Donald Trump. Just me, him, two security guys, and a toilet. The space was so tiny that his head almost touched the ceiling—I had been volunteering for him for a couple of months but hadn’t realized how tall he was until that moment.

All I could think was “Thank God he didn’t arrive two minutes earlier.” I knew of his legendary germophobia and suppressed a childlike urge to let him know I had only gone “number one.” Instead I just stood there, frozen in his presence. Maybe he was used to that. He finally motioned for me to step out past him.

Then, with a spark in his eye and a kind smile, he said, “Look, I’m not too proud to use this bathroom even if it is a ladies’ room. It can be our secret.” Instead of laughing or responding or acknowledging that he had broken the ice in a gracious way, I ran past him without a word. So although my perception of him that day was that he had made an awkward moment bearable, I’m sure he thought I was a complete idiot.

Thankfully, as time went on, he started to recognize me as the girl who was always with the press corps. I’d had the same role as a press wrangler with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2012, then worked as a press secretary for the Arizona attorney general, followed by the Speaker of the House. I had also held communications positions with some PR firms, so I was well versed in all things press/communications and media relations. I fervently hoped he had forgotten all about our weird bathroom encounter, but he never mentioned it and he was not one to keep passing thoughts in his head to himself. What he did say on a regular basis was that he appreciated the way I “handled” reporters. He often commented to me that he was surprised that they actually listened to me and we all seemed to get along. He clearly didn’t realize that I sometimes spent up to twenty hours a day with the traveling press corps, and they knew that if they fought me too hard, the days could turn quite unpleasant. I think Trump always wanted a better relationship with the press but didn’t know how to get it, as he had done so easily in his Apprentice days. More on that in a bit.

ELECTION NIGHT 2016 WAS a blur. I was working and with the press pool as usual. I was happy to have some of my “originals” in the pool that night—John Santucci with ABC, Noah Gray and Jeremy Diamond with CNN, Ali Vitali with NBC, and Sopan Deb with the New York Times, to name just a few. Because no one actually thought that Trump would beat Hillary Clinton, the veteran, more experienced reporters had all clamored to be assigned to her, leaving openings for other reporters to follow the Trump circus, where they ended up becoming household names, such as Jim Acosta, Hallie Jackson, and Katy Tur. I got along with most of them very well and came to like many of them. Because nothing in the Trump campaign ever resembled an ordinary campaign or even made sense most of the time, let alone followed a clear plan or had a coherent message or strategy, we were kind of all thrown into the logistical shit show together, feeling our way in the dark. On election night, we all sat in the small ballroom at the New York Hilton Midtown for hours, many in the room waiting for the race to be called for the Democrats. Yet that never happened. It seemed that with every state we won, the air in the room got easier to breathe. I spent most of the evening in the buffer with my reporter and photographer buddies while all my campaign colleagues got drunk off both their happiness and the abundant supply of alcohol all around us. The buffer is the space between the stage and the people in the audience, built for safety reasons but also allowing a small group of roughly twelve to fifteen members of the media to be up close and personal with the candidate or, in this case, the new president-elect. In the wee hours of the morning, President-elect Trump and the family came out.

As he walked toward the podium, he pointed at me as he always did, having come to recognize that I was the person on his team who was always with the press. I don’t generally cry, but I did that night. It was the culmination of long hours, days, and months. Of being away from my home in Arizona, my family, my best friend, and others. It was the realization that the chance I had taken had actually been worth it and all the people—family and friends alike—who had turned their backs on me would have to at least acknowledge that it wasn’t just me—that half the people in the country had chosen this man to lead the free world.

AS A RESULT OF my job as liaison to the press corps, I had a unique seat at many meetings in the early days of the Trump transition. I was the one who usually brought the press in, and I stood less than ten feet away from Trump while he performed for them. I choose the word “performed” deliberately because sometimes he seemed as though he was still hosting a TV show. It got to a point that he would seek out my face as soon as I brought the reporters in. I liked to think it was because I was probably one of the only friendly faces in that crew. Whatever Donald Trump said about the media publicly, I think it bothered him, especially early on, that he didn’t have the rapport with or respect from them that he’d had when he was an entertainment figure. He had said nutty, batshit things for decades, after all, and reporters had laughed or brushed them aside. Not anymore.

Trump was a hungry gossip. He consumed information about people almost as eagerly as he consumed Diet Cokes. Many times after I dismissed the press from a photo op, he would motion for me to stay back so he could ask which reporter had been the nicest, which had given me problems, who was friends with whom, and of course what they had privately said about him. Or sometimes if a reporter asked what he perceived to be a “nasty” question, he would ask me what I thought about the person and why we had allowed him or her in. That became quite a needle to thread because I respected the press corps and the job they did, but I also knew that if I told him some of the things they had said, he would either repeat it back to them—he has no filter, as I learned quickly—or kick them off the plane or out of the White House. Most of them clearly leaned left politically and seemed almost to consider the fact that Donald Trump was now president a bizarre joke. No good would come from my telling him their thoughts or conversations, so for the most part I came up with a standard response. I would generally say that a certain reporter was being “a bit difficult today,” roll my eyes, but then add that he or she was in awe of how far Trump had gotten and all that he had accomplished. That seemed to keep him happy, knowing I wasn’t best friends with any of the reporters while also stroking his ego. I don’t know if I was consciously trying to advance myself in his eyes that way, but it certainly didn’t hurt. I think perhaps he came to think of me as his spy.

My role became especially important to him during the transition, when he brought candidates for cabinet posts to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and trotted them out in front of the cameras. He placed great importance on making a “moment” or an event of the interviews, and he would always ask me what the press thought of each candidate. Did they think Chris Christie was going to get a job? What did they think of Rex Tillerson? Afterward, Trump would arrange for the cameras to capture both him and the candidate as he said goodbye to them. Those were often times when Trump would say a few words to the press. It was a master class in television production, and he was a natural producer. It was also the world he knew best, a sort of Celebrity Apprentice situation but for actual cabinet secretaries, and the press ate it up. Fundamentally, Trump wanted to impress reporters. Maybe, he seemed to think, they would start to write good things about him again.

It was a little petty of me, but my favorite of these interviews at the time was the one with Mitt Romney, who at least some in the press believed was a serious candidate to serve as Trump’s secretary of state. Romney apparently thought so too. The Trump-Romney feud, of course, had been very public and bitter. During the 2016 race, Romney had memorably denounced Trump in some of the harshest language the genteel former governor ever used. He’d said that Trump “lacks the temperament to be president” and that “dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark.” He’d called Trump “a con man” and “a fake.” And he, like many other #NeverTrumpers in the Republican Party, had condemned people who supported him or worked for him. Trump had responded as he always did with his usual bazooka blasts of insults: Romney was a “loser” and a “failure” and so on, including one of his most random, “Romney walks like a penguin.” Could Mitt Romney forgive and forget now that Trump was elected? Apparently. Could Donald Trump? Well, read on.

I had worked for the 2012 Romney campaign as an advance person. Though I’d spent limited time with the candidate, both he and Paul Ryan were always kind and appreciative of the people who worked for them. When I began working full-time for Trump, I received a number of messages from my 2012 colleagues telling me that I was ruining my career and how disappointed they were with me. So I’ll admit that I felt an odd sense of childish satisfaction when Romney, of all people, was suddenly on the list as a potential secretary of state and appeared to be gunning for the job.

After Romney’s first dog-and-pony-show meeting at Bedminster, there was much speculation among the press corps that President-elect Trump was meeting with Romney only to gloat and as payback for all of the criticism Romney had lobbed at him just weeks earlier. I didn’t believe that at the time and thought they were just stirring up trouble. Why would a newly elected president waste his time on something like that? He had won; there was no reason to rub it in. But I learned very quickly that that was exactly what Trump was doing, a revelation that was both surprising and not surprising at the same time. Of course this is something Donald Trump would do. The whole ploy was an open secret among key Trump advisers such as Jason Miller and Steve Bannon, who were delighted at Romney’s willingness to put himself through the humiliation, eat his words from the campaign, and still not get the job. That was my first lesson that these guys played for keeps.

One day when we were back in New York City, headquartered at Trump Tower, where the president-elect stayed until he moved to the White House, Jason Miller called to ask me to have the press ready that evening for an off-the-record stop at a restaurant in town. In political parlance, an off-the-record movement meant that I could tell the members of the press where we would be going but they could not report it until we arrived at the location. This is most generally for security purposes but also so that the site doesn’t become crowded with fans and protestors who would hear hours earlier that Trump was planning to show up.

“What’s going on?” I asked Jason. Herding the press corps around with few details wasn’t easy, and I knew I’d get endless questions (and complaints) from reporters.

He told me that there would be a dinner at Jean-Georges restaurant in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Midtown. I needed to be ready to bring the press into the dining room to get a shot. He then revealed who was going to be in attendance: Trump and Mitt Romney.

Though he didn’t say it in so many words, Jason made it obvious that Trump had cooked up the dinner, so to speak, just to torture the guy a little more. The setting was Trump’s turf—a restaurant in his building and one of the best in the city. The place had three Michelin stars and four stars from the New York Times (probably the last time they would be so nice to a Trump property) and was run by the world-renowned chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. But the point wasn’t to treat Romney to the best, it was to show him who was in charge. Trump wanted all the press to see that Romney would come all the way to New York and sit down with a man he had called a “con artist” and “a fake” to sing for his supper. Donald Trump was many things, but even his critics had to admit that he was a master at TV spectacles. This was yet another, set to be one for the ages.

Several members of the team, including Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media guru, and campaign adviser Jason Miller, were especially proud of that photo op. But when Trump’s designated White House chief of staff Reince Priebus ended up attending the dinner, too, I thought the whole affair might turn out to be more civil than what I had originally prepared for. I had been imagining something like Trump shouting “You’re fired!” right after he finished his steak and then watching Romney slink out of the restaurant “like a penguin.”

As in most restaurants in New York City, the space was small and the dining room was packed, with little distance between tables. This presents quite a logistical challenge when you have twenty members of the press, some with TV cameras and boom mics, the rest with cell phones and mini recorders, all trying to get as close as possible to record the scene. Based on the sneers and dirty looks—welcome to New York!—the rest of the patrons in the restaurant were not at all pleased, nor were the waitstaff for that matter. They had to juggle serving trays and plates around an angry crowd of regulars, a VIP table with the president-elect, Secret Service agents, and an aggressive, impatient press contingent. We stayed in the dark restaurant for a good ten minutes, flashing lights, shouting questions, hitting people in the head with equipment or backpacks. Everyone was stressed and annoyed and hot and miserable. Well, almost everyone. One person in the room wasn’t annoyed, pissed off, or even slightly bothered. The president-elect loved it all. His seat at the table was facing the press, and he made eye contact with every one of them, flashing big smiles and a thumbs-up. He was basking in his glory, the center of attention, center of politics, center of the world. And some poor sap beside him was about to be his main course. The dinner began, by the way, with frog leg soup. I’m not sure whose idea that was. Maybe Trump ordered it because he figured that was something a fancy guy like Romney, whose wife taught horses to dance, would want to eat? Maybe he wanted to show off a Jean-Georges specialty? Who knows? But knowing that Trump’s own dining habits resembled those of a sixteen-year-old, I couldn’t see it being his idea.

The press got their photos of the three of them at their table, and it would be one of the enduring images of the Trump era. The shot everybody remembers focused on Trump and Romney, with Priebus out of frame completely (an appropriate metaphor for his entire White House tenure). Trump is flashing a huge grin, while next to him, Romney looks awkward and uncomfortable—like someone who had swallowed a penguin rather than walked like one.

As I watched the scene unfold, my earlier petty feelings disappeared in an instant. I felt sorry for Romney as he sat there like an animal in a zoo, glancing around nervously and politely, clearly uncomfortable with the spectacle, as he prepared to receive his just desserts. It was cruel. If anyone else on the Trump team felt that way or even had a shred of regret about the scene, they kept it secret. Somewhere inside me a little voice told me that it was all so wrong, but then the voice was gone. I had a job to do and I was going to do it, even if I didn’t think this was the right way to go about it.

After the photo op, I was told to hold the reporters in a room until the president-elect left, then move them to the sidewalk. That, too, was for a purpose: so the cameras could capture Governor Romney walking out all alone, looking pathetic. I assumed it meant that Trump had told him at dinner that he wasn’t getting the job and they were leaving it for Romney to tell the assembled press corps he was not selected. At least, I thought, this will be over now. Instead, as he stood there alone, left on the side of the road, Romney said he was “still hopeful” about getting the job and that the conversation with Trump had been “a good one.” That was one of the first times I learned that Trump never liked to deliver bad news in person. Instead he’d let Romney’s agony continue a little longer. Nearly two more weeks passed before Romney announced on Facebook that he wouldn’t be serving as secretary of state, while adding that he was “hopeful” about the Trump administration. I don’t know how aware he was at that point about Trump’s deliberate, slow torture of him or if he was a particularly vengeful man. But in the years to come he would find ways to get back at Trump.

AS USUAL, I WAS forgotten over the next few days. Since I was always stationed with the press, no one higher up on the Trump team really knew what it was I did or all that went into the logistics of organizing a press pool. With the exception of George Gigicos and Kellyanne Conway, who had worked on campaigns before and understood my role, I was known simply as “the press girl.” Now that Trump was president-elect, my job would be taken to a more official level, but because this was all new to pretty much everyone on the team, no one realized or had the time to think about the fact that someone would still need to organize or escort the protective pool if the president-elect made a movement. Whereas most everyone else on the team was named to the transition team or went back home to prepare to move to DC ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. We Won—Now What?
• 2. “This Is Going to Be a Shit Show”
• 3. Rapunzel
• 4. Shangri-La
• 5. Trump Abroad
• 6. Chief Two
• 7. Our Storm
• 8. The Damn Jacket
• 9. Africa
• 10. Chief Three
• 11. The Princess and the Queen
• 12. Three Jobs
• 13. The West Wing
• 14. Killers
• 15. Impeachment Number One
• 16. Hidden Enemy
• 17. Chief Four
• 18. Headed Back East
• 19. Dog Park Girl
• 20. Boys Will Be Boys
• 21. Snakes and Home Depot
• 22. Election Night
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher