Donald Trump isn’t wrong about everything. His former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said Trump, behind closed doors, calls his supporters “basement dwellers,” which, yep, checks out.
Grisham was a self-styled “true believer,” signing on to work with the Trump campaign in 2015 – back when Huffington Post was still covering Trump’s political foray in its entertainment section – and she was with the administration until submitting her resignation on Jan. 6, 2021.
It was on that day, in the midst of the violence ongoing at the U.S. Capitol, instigated by Trump supporters who overran Capitol Police after the president had encouraged them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and “fight like hell,” because “if you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” that Grisham asked First Lady Melania Trump whether they could tweet out that while peaceful protest is the right of every American, “there’s no place for lawlessness or violence.”
“She replied with one word: ‘No,'” Grisham said in a speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday.
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“I became the first senior staffer to resign that day. I couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer,” said Grisham, who, just to be clear, is no angel.
Grisham famously defended Trump calling Never Trump Republicans “human scum,” saying “they deserve strong language like that,” and claimed in 2019 that outgoing Obama administration officials had left “you will fail” notes for incoming Trump administration staff, before later retracting that claim, which is to say, admitting, basically, that it was a bald-faced lie.
Grisham was also constantly under fire for not holding press briefings, defending herself on that count by saying “the briefings have become a lot of theater, and I think that a lot of reporters were doing it to get famous. I mean, yeah, they’re writing books now. I mean, they’re all getting famous off of this presidency. And so, I think it’s great what we’re doing now.”
Grisham told a different story on the press-briefings issue in her DNC speech.
“It’s because, unlike my boss, I never wanted to stand at that podium and lie,” Grisham said, adding that Trump used to tell her, “It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough, and people will believe you.”
To be fair, it’s hard to put a lot of stock into anything anybody in the Trump orbit has to say, and Grisham has more than her fair share of skeletons in her closet in that respect – she lost a job as the spokesperson for AAA Arizona because she was caught falsifying expense reports, then was fired from an ad-agency job for plagiarizing AAA content for a client’s website.
Keep in mind, this was Trump’s first team that she was on, supposedly representing the best and brightest of the MAGA bunch.
Grisham, to her credit, such as she deserves any credit, is among the relative few in the inner circle that didn’t end up in jail, but that’s only because simply being crass isn’t a crime.
The people who worked with Trump in his first term that didn’t end up in jail have gone on the record saying they don’t think he should be anywhere near being elected to a second term, and several have gone the route of Grisham in outright endorsing Kamala Harris.
It’s to a point where it seems the only people Trump has left are those that he mocks behind closed doors as “basement dwellers.”
Hey, at least the true believers finally know what their hero really thinks of them.
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Chris Graham
