The sketches of life with Trump and his family that Grisham alleges are unquestionably titillating: her claims about the former president’s private interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin; his concern about his masculine, shall we say, proportions; his puerile attitude toward women.
Then there are the allegations of pretension and power-grabbing by his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner — advisers to Trump — along with behind-the-scenes looks at key moments in White House life. All in all, an amusing retrospective of a bizarre presidency.
But Grisham’s stories — and those recounted in a slew of recent books by and about people with front-row seats to Trump’s presidency — are much more than that. They carry enormous weight today as we see Trump and his acolytes laying the groundwork to try to capture the presidency in 2024, apparently
at any cost. Viewed in this context, they are dark portents.
When Grisham describes Trump’s
“terrifying” rage episodes, one wonders what could happen in another Trump administration, with an even more emboldened president — one who was so frightening to those who served under him, that the country’s top military man, General Mark Milley and the
speaker of the House worried he might strike China. (In a forthcoming book by Susan Glasser, Milley is also depicted fearing Trump would
provoke Iran to war.)
Grisham is not nearly as well-known as Trump’s other press secretaries because, incredibly, she didn’t hold a single press conference, arguably her principal function in the job. (The book’s title, presumably, is deliberately ironic.)
And yet, she spent more time than the other three working with the administration — she joined the campaign in 2015 and resigned after the January 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters — so she accumulated a trove of astounding stories surely enraging the former president. (“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” he
said in a statement Tuesday.)
She offers glimpses into one of the lingering mysteries of Trump’s presidency, his curiously deferential approach to Putin. Despite Trump’s relentless praise, she says, Putin was cold to Trump when they met in Osaka, Japan, for a 2019 G-20 meeting. So, she alleges, Trump kept trying to impress him.
According to Grisham’s account, as the media prepared to enter the meeting room, Trump — who declared it “a great honor to be with President Putin,” even though US intelligence was convinced Russia had been systematically attacking US elections to undermine democracy — leaned over and told Putin, “I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras…you understand.”
What’s interesting is what happened later.
Click here to refresh your memory. Reporters walked in and asked Trump if he was going to warn Putin to keep his hands off the upcoming…
Read More: Opinion: A scary portrait of life inside Trump’s White House