Insider’s new book to detail Trump’s ‘terrifying’ temper
WASHINGTON — Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary perhaps best known for never holding a televised briefing with reporters, plans to release a tell-all book next week that accuses President Donald Trump of abusing his staff, placating dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, and making sexual comments about a young White House aide.
In her book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Grisham recalls her time working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Trump’s (first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid.
“I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic,” Grisham writes, offering a reason for why she never held a briefing.
After serving as press secretary, Grisham worked in first lady Melania Trump’s office. She resigned Jan. 6 as a horde of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Her book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House, though by the time she departed Washington that number had dwindled.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, calls the book “the most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet.”
Trump and his advisers have moved to discredit Grisham’s account.
“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” Trump said Tuesday. He accused her of becoming “very angry and bitter” after a breakup. “Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
In her book, Grisham offered a preemptive response to the criticism: “This is not, by the way, a book where you need to like me.”
She was a close-up observer of Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia because, she reasons, even temporarily assigning power to the vice president would have been “showing weakness.”
Grisham lands on a well-documented theme when she explores Trump’s love of dictators. But she says Trump went out of his way to please one in particular: Putin, whose cold reception of Trump, she writes, seemed to make the president want to impress him even more.
“With all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, ‘OK, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand,’”
Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.
Grisham also confirms what she and Melania Trump had long denied: That the first lady was angry after reports of her husband’s infidelities — and hush money payments — surfaced in the media. To the contrary: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the allegations that followed from other women,” Grisham writes, “I felt that Mrs. Trump was basically unleashed.”
As she tries to please Trump, whose press coverage was relentlessly negative, she describes his anger toward her and others as “terrifying”: “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras,” she writes, “I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”