Stephanie Grisham's tell-all book

Except we still don't know why former PressSec never gave a briefing. Ever

Yes, I know, writing a critical book about almost any White House administration in which you worked is, by definition, a betrayal. As a rule, the authors of such books are held in low esteem — at least until President Donald Trump took the oath of office.

A new such book , “I’ll Take Your Questions Now. What I Saw at the Trump White House,” is the work of former Trump Press Secretary and Communications Director Stephanie Grisham, who famously never gave a press briefing in the briefing room.

Grisham joins the ranks of Omarosa, Anonymous, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton — all former Trump associates who soured on the 45th president and lived to write about it.

But this book is not a take-down and it is not a whitewash, like some books written by former aides who want to stay in Trump World’s good graces. It’s one woman’s story about what it was like to work in the Trump White House, good and bad. (Sort of like Trump gatekeeper' Madeleine Westerhout’s book, “Off the Record: My Dream Job at the White House, How I Lost It, and What I Learned.”)

Apparently yelling at staff, humiliating aides by berating them to the press and firing your top people on Twitter invites blowback.

If Grisham doesn’t exude loyalty, she does exhibit a fondness for Team Trump, with anecdotes that confirm the readers’ suspicions about what Trump is like off camera. The highs - dinner with Prince Charles - and the lows - Trump’s wrath. Throw in the chaos, the anxiety, the weirdness, the backstabbing and the addictive nature of the job.

Here’s how it starts.

“I could start this book any number of ways. I could tell you about the way Vladimir Putin toyed with the president of the United States by using a very attractive translator at one of their meetings or when there was a fight with Chinese security during a trip to Beijing and the nuclear football was in the middle of it. Or when President Trump, a solemn, intense look crossing his face, leaned toward me on board Marine One to ask me the most pressing question on his mind: “Are your teeth real?” Or when Mrs. Trump enlisted her staff to reenact a White House event at the new tennis court she’d had remodeled so she could get a better photo of herself for her photo albums…”

Grisham describes former First Lady Melania Trump, for whom the one-time White House press secretary and communications director eventually served as chief of staff, as distant and preoccupied with her photo albums. Sometimes Melania stood up to Trump; other times, she shrugged and decided a fight was not winnable or worth the effort.

On election night 2020 as the White House awaited to see if Trump would be re-elected, Grisham was shocked to find FLOTUS asleep in the East Wing. (The one-time model believed sleep was essential to her beauty regimen.)

Is the book believable? Yes. Do I think she held back in some areas? Absolutely.

Grisham never really explains why she never had a press briefing over her eight months as White House Press Secretary.

She writes that she did not hold specific briefings because Trump prodded her to lie, or embarrass herself. (Trump told her to give a briefing in which she could reenact his “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.)

“Oh. My. Dear Lord. I was speechless. So my very first press conference,” she writes, “I was to make my debut in the historic James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and read the transcript to reporters and cameras, presumably with a Ukrainian accent” for Zelenskiy.

To her credit, Grisham declined.

Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.

Sign up for alerts for future posts.