Stephanie Grisham spent years at the side of the Trumps, serving as then-President Donald Trump’s press secretary and as chief of staff for first lady Melania Trump.
She quit her job in protest after the January 6 US Capitol riot and has written a tell-all memoir of her time at the center of the Trump storm, due out next week.
Excerpts of the book leaked Tuesday, including Grisham writing of Trump’s “terrifying” temper: “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing,” she wrote.
Trump, never one to let any slight (real or perceived) go, issued a statement via a spokeswoman that, in part, read this way:
“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning. She became very angry and bitter after her break up and as time went on she was seldom relied upon, or even thought about. She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
Yes, you read that right. The former President of the United States said that Grisham’s book shouldn’t be taken seriously because she was “very angry and bitter” after a breakup.
(The relationship Trump is referencing is the one between Grisham and onetime White House aide Max Miller, who is currently running for Congress in Ohio and facing some tough questions about past behavior.)
Trump’s dismissiveness of Grisham’s book – and Grisham – as nothing more than a bitter woman on the wrong end of a breakup is appalling even by his decidedly low standards.
If you expect there to be any blowback for Trump’s attack on Grisham from Republican elected officials, you haven’t been paying much attention to politics for the past five years or so.
This, like so many other excesses and inappropriate comments from Trump, will be ignored or, in some quarters, even defended.
The Point: When we don’t denounce stuff like this from Trump, we tacitly tolerate it. And look where that’s left the Republican Party.