The new Stephanie Grisham book is deliciously dishy:
Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.
She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, 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.” […]
He was such a patsy and they all knew it. It’s amazing we managed to live through it.
Grisham is undeniably one of the Trump originals. She was wrangling reporters on the campaign plane in 2016, before working her way into the Trumps’ inner circles. And she is still viewed widely as a consummate Trump insider.
In Grisham’s telling, Putin seemed to be attempting to throw Trump off his game in Osaka. She writes that Fiona Hill, the White House’s top Russia adviser, told her that Putin brought to their meeting an unusually attractive female translator, whose presence seemed intended to distract the U.S. president.
Putin also seemed to be coughing and clearing his throat an inordinate number of times throughout the meeting. Hill speculated to Grisham that he was probably attempting to trigger Trump’s well-known germaphobe tendencies, Grisham writes.
This is probably true. We know that Putin showed up to a meeting with Angela merkel with a couple of big dogs, knowing that she has a particular fear of them.
Grisham alleges that Trump became obsessed with a young, female press aide who isn’t named in the book. The president constantly asked where the aide was during press events, Grisham wrote, and allegedly once requested that she be brought to his cabin on Air Force One so he could “look at her [behind].”
Trump behaved inappropriately with Grisham, too, she wrote — once calling her from Air Force One to assure her that his penis was not small or toadstool-shaped, as the porn star Stormy Daniels had alleged in an interview.
Grisham wrote that Trump once asked her then-boyfriend, a fellow Trump aide, if she was good in bed.
Obviously, Republicans don’t care if Trump was sleeping with young aides two at a time in the Oval Office. They know what he is. He bragged about it on camera. But it’s still astonishing to see the allegedly GOP, previously obsessed with what they would tell their kids about the immorality of politicians shrugging this stuff off.
And then there is the family. Oh my what a bunch of creepy climbers”
She is particularly negative about the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner — both of whom held senior White House positions. She wrote that the first lady and White House staff called Ivanka “the Princess” who regularly invoked “my father” in work meetings, and Grisham dubbed Kushner “the Slim Reaper” for his habit of inserting himself into other people’s projects, making a mess and leaving them to take the blame.
Tellingly, Grisham writes that Ivanka and Jared tried to push their way into meeting Queen Elizabeth II alongside the president and first lady, a wild breach of protocol on a state visit, but were thwarted when they couldn’t fit into the helicopter. “I finally figured out what was going on,” Grisham writes. “Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States.”
“I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared,” Grisham writes. “She didn’t disagree with me.”
By the end of the administration, Grisham says, Kushner was Trump’s “real chief of staff.” He sat next to Pence, the vice president and the newly named head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and ran the first meeting about what Trump should say to the nation about the pandemic. He also apparently dictated much of the president’s first widely criticized televised address about the pandemic — the one that announced travel restrictions before alerting the federal agencies who would have to implement them.
And about that gross jacket Melania wore to visit the children being held on the border:
The first lady had been upset by the situation her husband’s immigration policies had caused and wanted to see it for herself. For reasons that still remain a mystery, she’d ordered a $39 jacket online from Zara. Grisham said she was on her phone ironing out details for the trip and missed the chance to stop Melania Trump from wearing it.
It was just a jacket, Melania said, as she huddled with Grisham for a damage-control session on the plane. As they arrived back at the White House, an aide told them the president wanted to see his wife in the Oval Office. It was the first time he’d ever summoned her in such a way in front of staff. He yelled and asked “what the [expletive]” they thought they were doing. Then just as quickly he came up with a solution. He would tweet out that the jacket was a message to the Fake News Media.
It’s the story that the first lady repeated four months later in her first and only televised interview during the administration.
What a piece of work…
The Melania Trump whom Grisham describes is as stubborn as her husband, but his temperamental opposite. She believed in self-care so much that she’d change into a robe and slippers almost immediately upon boarding Air Force One. Self-consciousness around her accent and her English grammar meant she rarely wrote anything on her own.
The Secret Service gave her a nickname, “Rapunzel,” because she rarely left her tower, a.k.a the White House residence. Agents would request to be placed on her detail so they could spend more time with their families, Grisham writes.
If she wasn’t spending time with her son, Barron, or her parents, she was working on her photo albums, which Grisham calls one of “her two children.” Deep into the pandemic, she spent two hours recreating the ribbon-cutting for the White House tennis pavilion because she hadn’t gotten the right shot weeks earlier. She was working on a photo shoot of a rug during the Capitol riot.
Apparently Melania’s nose was out of joint about the Stormy Daniels thing, but not really all that much:
The airing of Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels is what “unleashed” Melania Trump to start publicly contradicting or ignoring her husband — trying to embarrass him as he had embarrassed her. She walked into his first State of the Union address arm-in-arm with a handsome military aide Grisham had hand-selected because, Melania said, the floors of the Capitol were too slippery.
“I laughed to myself because I’d seen the woman navigate dirt roads in her heels,” Grisham writes.
And when Grisham drafted a tweet for Melania requesting privacy, saying she was concentrating on being a mother, wife and first lady, she had Grisham remove the word “wife.”
What the scandal didn’t unleash was an emotional reaction. Grisham wrote that Melania Trump didn’t believe her husband’s denials of the affair, but essentially shrugged it all off:“This is Donald’s problem. He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.”
Obsessed with nothing but her scrap books, she slept through election night. She did agree that the election was stolen though. Of course.
She went along with Trump’s plan to snub Jill Biden rather than invite her over to the traditional first ladies tea welcoming her to the White House, according to Grisham.
And the first lady also pointed out how she’d been criticized for not standing next to Trump the way Jill Biden stood next to her husband on election night. “She said, ‘I don’t stand next to him because I don’t need to hold him up like she does. Can you imagine?’ ” Grisham writes. “That made me laugh.”
How nice. This made me laugh:
Grisham even claims to know dirt on Trump’s hair, which she says he cuts himself with “a huge pair of scissors that could probably cut a ribbon at an opening of one of his properties.”
That explains a lot.