Will the Real Stephanie Grisham Please Sit Down

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham caused a bit of a stir last week at the Democratic National Convention.

Stephanie Grisham had an earlier history with Trump

Grisham, who resigned on Jan. 6, 2021, in a supposed protest against President Donald Trump for his alleged inaction when demonstrators invaded the U.S. Capitol, endorsed Kamala Harris and claimed that from her personal knowledge Trump has “no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

But wait a minute.

How did Grisham become an arbiter of morals and a purveyor of “fidelity to the truth”?

After all, Grisham worked for Trump and his wife, first lady Melania Trump, for six years, starting as a campaign worker in August 2015 and then working as press secretary to both the first lady and the president after Trump’s election in 2016.

You have to ask yourself how Grisham had worked for the Trumps for six years without managing to notice that they were rotten scum. One is supposed to believe that she only figured out that Trump was a bad person two weeks before he left office when she resigned in protest. But if she knew Trump as well as she claims, and he was as horrible as she says now, then she should have quit years before.

“I saw him when the cameras were off,” Grisham told the Democrats’ convention. “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers. On a hospital visit when people were dying he was mad that cameras were not watching him.”

A press secretary who never held a press briefing

Well, boohoo. “Basement dwellers” is not an insult unless we are given a specific context. Maybe he was being dismissive of the so-called white supremacists that the major media has tried to link him with. And if Trump was mad about no press coverage on a hospital visit, it’s likely he was venting at Grisham, because as press secretary it was her job to make sure that the press did cover the event.

But Grisham famously didn’t think it was necessary to do her job in order to collect a paycheck. She claims the dubious distinction of being the only presidential press secretary in modern history to never hold a White House briefing. Her loyalty to the family that employed her for six years was non-existent. She high-tailed it out of the White House on Jan. 6 when the president needed her more than ever, and at the Democratic convention last week, she tried to shame Melania for not authorizing Grisham to exceed her authority by issuing a tweet condemning the Jan. 6 violence while the crisis was still ongoing. Again, you have to question her own morals and fidelity.

Stephanie Grisham cannot question anyone else’s job performance

If you look back at Grisham’s job history, you quickly realize she has no right to question the job performance of anyone else – certainly not the president of the United States. As the New York Times reported in 2019 when she was promoted to be the president’s press secretary, Grisham’s resumé included “losing a private-sector job after being accused of cheating on expense reports, a later job loss over plagiarism charges and two arrests for driving under the influence …”

If I had been hired for a new job after such a dismal record, I would be forever grateful to the employer who gave me a second chance, but gratitude is not a quality that Grisham wears well.

I also have my own reason for questioning the authenticity of Stephanie Grisham, and not just because she worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign before signing up with Trump three years later – and endorsing radical socialist Kamala Harris four years after that. Does Grisham have any true principles and beliefs, or does she just say what is convenient?

I’ve had reason to ask that ever since she threw Trump under the bus on Jan. 6. At the time, I pulled out a thank-you card I’d received 16 months earlier from “The White House.” It was a note from Stephanie Grisham just a little more than two months after she had been hired as Trump’s press secretary.

I wanted to send you a quick note thanking you for your commentary piece in RealClearPolitics on September 9 [2019]. It is hard to find fair and balanced coverage of this White House, yet your article was able to brilliantly capture the relationship between President Trump and the hostile media. Keep up the great work.

The author defended her when she didn’t deserve it

It was the final four words that stuck in my craw. Because I had supported Grisham during her eight-month tenure as White House press secretary. I thought she was doing “great work,” including by refusing to hold press briefings for a media that was indeed hostile to Trump.

In my column titled “In Media War, It’s Trump vs. the Black Knight,” I defended both Grisham and Trump from the claims that Grisham was hiding. Unlike Trump’s successor, President Biden, or his current challenger, Kamala Harris, Trump never shied away from the press and he answered with authority instead of depending on a press secretary to run interference for him.

When Grisham sent me her thank-you note, I felt that she really understood that the Fake News Media would do and report anything in order to damage President Trump. Her interviews in the succeeding months just reinforced that notion. When asked if Trump should apologize for referring to Never Trump Republicans as “human scum,” she replied as a true ally of the president would:

No, no, he shouldn’t. The people who are against him and who have been against him and working against his [agenda] since the day they took office are just that. It is horrible that people are working against a president who is delivering results for this country and has been since day one. And, the fact that people continue to try to negate anything he’s been trying to do and take away from the good work he’s doing on behalf of the American people, they deserve strong language like that.

What happened?

What happened to that Stephanie Grisham? Where was she on Jan. 6, 2021? Didn’t she understand that those events were incited by and magnified by “people [who] continue to try to negate anything he’s been trying to do and take away from the good work he’s doing on behalf of the American people”? Sounds to me like she just surrendered to the hostile media and repeated their anti-Trump narrative because it was easier than doing her job.

On the old TV show “To Tell the Truth,” the host would have asked “Will the real Stephanie Grisham please stand up?” But after seeing how Grisham has betrayed the trust handed to her over and over, anyone who belongs to any political party should say instead, “Will the real Stephanie Grisham please sit down and shut up?”

We’ve heard enough.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.