Stephanie Grisham (OMGrisham) isn't asking for redemption. The former White House press secretary spoke with Olivianuzzi about her tell-all book and being 'part of something unusually evil'
Photo: Dina Litovsky Stephanie Grisham saw the pickup outside and yelped, “That’s Larry!” She grabbed a small package and raced out her front door, down the steps of the porch, through the gate of the white picket fence, and leaned halfway into the truck via the passenger window. “I wanted you to have this,” she told him, handing it over.
Grisham was worried, she said, that Larry would be “disappointed.” A few hours later, he returned with several pounds of filet mignon. She discloses how, at the G20 in Osaka, the president told Vladimir Putin he would be acting “a little tougher” on him “for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk.” How Fiona Hill observed that Putin brought an attractive female translator to their meeting, likely as a means to distract the president . How the president asked her then-boyfriend how she was in bed.
“I was weighing the fact that I myself had said so many nasty things about people who had written books. I was weighing my own loyalty, because even though I resigned, I still am to this day —” she hesitated. “I feel guilty,” she said, “because I was so entrenched with them. They were a huge part of my life for a really long time, and I gave up a lot to work for both of them, and I really believed in them, and I don’t think you just shut all that off overnight. I’m not a cyborg.
For much of the final year of the Trump administration, Grisham commuted 1,337 miles the way other people travel from Montclair, New Jersey, to midtown, from the center of the mayhem engulfing the doomed president to the calm of this remote expanse of the Great Plains. She did so in secret, with Benjamin and Eleanore, her French bulldogs, on her lap, while maintaining her top-tier positions and $183,000 salary.
As I read Grisham’s book, I kept thinking that it felt, in some ways, like the story of the Trump presidency was less about one demagogue than it was about the everyday choices of the smaller people working at the levels below policy-making, and how run-of-the-mill self-centeredness and expediency, when practiced by dozens or hundreds of people in an organization, amounts to the system that allows evil. The Trump administration was not possible because of Trump and his brain trust, as it were.
Grisham was a John F. Kennedy superfan as a child, she said, and loved sparring with her grandfather, who had worked for Ronald Reagan. She was the kind of kid who liked C-SPAN and, later, The West Wing. But by her early 20s, she had married a local news anchor and given birth to her first son. And by the time she was working on a presidential campaign, as an assistant press aide for Mitt Romney in 2012, she was 36. She returned to a job with the Arizona attorney general after that.
One of the former senior White House officials I spoke to about Grisham described the career options that typically await an ex-presidential aide as “formulaic.” This person said, “They have these lucrative jobs in lobbying, or big corporate jobs; they write a memoir-type book — typically not a takedown, but more ‘These are my experiences and I was privileged to have them.’ They get a contributorship, they have some board seats, they get a position at a think tank.
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