Stephanie Grisham

The press secretary who never briefed

Stephanie Grisham was one of Donald Trump’s longest-serving aides, having joined his 2016 presidential campaign in 2015 (Associated Press). She became White House press secretary in July 2019 and held the post for nine months — during which she never held a formal televised press briefing (The New York Times; Associated Press). Before the Trump campaign she had wrangled reporters for Mitt Romney (The New York Times).

After leaving the press-secretary role in the spring of 2020, she became chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump — the position she held, alongside the first lady’s press-secretary duties, when the Capitol was attacked (The Straits Times). Grisham resigned on January 6, 2021, following the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters; in her resignation statement she called it an “honor” to have served and to have been part of the first lady’s “mission” to help children (Associated Press).

The memoir: Kushner as the “real” chief of staff

Later in 2021 Grisham published her tell-all, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House (The Straits Times; HarperCollins). Its most pointed sustained target was Jared Kushner, whom Grisham portrayed as the White House’s “real” chief of staff — the man whose insistence “carried weight” even when the president himself wanted to cancel a trip (ThePrint).

The book’s summary of Kushner’s reach went further: he enjoyed “walk-in privileges” in the Oval Office and was “later in charge of Trump’s re-election campaign too” (ThePrint). On the February 2020 India trip, Grisham wrote that when Trump said he didn’t “really want to go” over COVID fears and planned to tell India’s prime minister he would come “later, in my second term,” it was Kushner who talked him back into it — and that Kushner and his team then negotiated directly with the Indian government over what American security assets and personnel would be on the ground, “negotiations that were normally reserved for the Secret Service” (ThePrint). Grisham wrote that she never understood what the trip was so important to Kushner for, “or what, if anything, he got out of it” (ThePrint).

The memoir also contradicted Trump’s later self-mythology on the pandemic’s earliest days: Grisham wrote that “contrary to what he would say later, he didn’t immediately want to ban travel to China,” and that he asked White House officials whether they were making “too big a deal out of this” (ThePrint).

A score-settling cast

The New York Times’s review of the memoir found a book that was “part giddy travelogue, part belated apologia, part petty payback, all personal-therapy session” (The New York Times). Its gallery of nicknames became instant political currency: Mark Meadows, the waning-days chief of staff, rated a 12 on Grisham’s “scale of awfulness in the Trump White House” where five was the worst; Senator Lindsey Graham was dubbed “Senator Freeloader” for his “gross and tacky” poolside habits at Bedminster; and Kushner was “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit” (The New York Times).

The review also traced the book’s emotional spine: Grisham’s East Wing bond with Melania Trump, “from whom she’s been estranged since quitting, finally, during the Capitol insurrection,” and her conclusion that she had been in a “classic abuse relationship,” with the president a “distant, erratic” father figure whose phone calls and bursts of temper induced a chest-tightening panic (The New York Times).

From loyalist to organizer against Trump

Grisham’s break with Trump did not end with resignation. In January 2022 she said she was compiling a group of about 15 former Trump White House staff — including Olivia Troye, a former national-security aide to Mike Pence, and former communications director Anthony Scaramucci — to discuss “how we can formally do some things to try and stop him, and also the extremism, that kind of violence and rhetoric that has been talked about and continues to divide our country” (The Straits Times). The announcement came the night after she testified before the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol (The Straits Times). She also offered a prediction about where the inquiry would land: even if no criminal charges were brought against Trump, she said, the committee was “going to show you know, irrefutable proof that he was behind this” (The Straits Times).

The 2024 DNC speech

On August 20, 2024, Grisham took the stage on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to endorse Kamala Harris (ThePrint). “I wasn’t just a Trump supporter, I was a true believer. I was one of his closest advisers,” she said — then added: “Behind closed doors, Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers. He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth” (ThePrint).

She recalled that on January 6 she had asked Melania whether they could at least post that “while peaceful protest is the right of every American, there’s no place for lawlessness or violence” — and that Melania replied with one word: “No” (ThePrint). She closed by saying she was appearing to advocate for a Democrat because “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth, she respects the American people and she has my vote” (ThePrint). She also said she had not voted for Trump in the 2020 election even while working for the first lady, and that she was “terrified” of a second Trump term (ThePrint).

What this profile does not claim

It does not give the memoir’s exact release date or bestseller rankings, which rest on bookseller snippets rather than a full-read source. It does not state the exact date Grisham became the first lady’s chief of staff, which no full-read source confirmed. It omits her personal background — birth date, schooling, Arizona career — because only encyclopedia leads covered it. It does not assert whether her planned ex-staffers group ever formalized. It does not repeat the memoir’s most salacious unattributed anecdotes (such as the ex-boyfriend material) where the sources themselves flag them as unconfirmed. The Kushner portrayals are presented as Grisham’s claims from her memoir, not as independently established facts.