Brian Morgenstern - Vignettes & Vino: Dinner Table Stories from the Trump White House with Recipes & Cocktail Pairings

Advance Praise for

Vignettes & Vino

Brian and Teresa are like Chip and Joanna Gaines meet The West Wing . They have lots of heartwarming, poignant, and sometimes maddening tales about how government really works from their time in the White House. Plus their recipes will make your mouth water. A great book to read anytime, especially while drinking one of their delicious cocktails.

Buck Sexton , Co-Host of The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show

All American power couple Brian and Teresa Morgenstern have produced an absolutely unique and hilarious view of Washington, D.C. Lucky for us, theyre taking readers along for a delicious ride with exquisite cocktails and tasty recipes. Everyone needs this book, but especially if you want to survive a career in politics.

Katie Pavlich , Fox News Contributor and Editor of TownHall.com

The book gives us such a personal and unique look at Teresa and Brians experiences working inside the Trump administration. Its a fun and interesting read, and I cant wait to try the recipes and cocktails.

John Bachman , Host of John Bachman Now on Newsmax

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Vignettes & Vino:

Dinner Table Stories from the Trump White House with Recipes & Cocktail Pairings

2022 by Brian & Teresa Morgenstern

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-498-9

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-499-6

Cover design by Cody Corcoran

Cover photo by Will DeGraw, Clever Disarray Photography

Photos courtesy of the authors unless otherwise specified.

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situation are portrayed to the best of the authors memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

W e were never supposed to meet each other. According to the news media, Donald Trump wasnt supposed to get elected president. Neither of us was supposed to get a job in his administration. Neither of us was supposed to go out to a party on a random Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. But we did. And we met. And we fell in love.

Then COVID-19 happened. The hottest economy in history ground to a halt because of a global pandemic. We found ourselves basically living together far sooner in our relationship than we had planned, because we didnt want to quarantine alone. That could have gone one of two ways. Either the cracks in our relationship could have become fault lines faster, or we could have grown closer together faster. Thank God it was the latter.

When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, Brian was working at the Treasury Department, where he helped run relief programs designed to keep Americans connected to their jobs and to provide them with liquidity. This was a 24/7 effort. He remained involved in those efforts until July 2020, when he moved from the Treasury across the street to the White House, to join the press and communications team for the home stretch of the presidential election.

Teresa had been working at the Commerce Department handling protocol, which means that her responsibilities heavily involved managing the Commerce Department secretarys travel schedule for foreign trade missions and the like. When COVID arrived in early 2020, that stopped abruptly. There was no more travel, and everyone was told to work remotely. So, while Brian worked, Teresa cooked. And she cooked some absolutely amazing meals. Thats where the recipe and cocktail pairings for this book came into play.

Then, in the summer of 2020, Teresa was asked to move over to the Pentagon to assume the role of deputy press secretary. From there, she was quickly detailed to the White House to work on Operation Warp Speed, as a Pentagon representative on the task force charged with creating vaccines five times faster than any other vaccine in history.

So there we were, working together at the highest levels of government during a pandemic, a presidential election, and riots across the countryoh, and an unexpected Supreme Court confirmation. Beyond what we learned by surviving a volatile media environment, viral outbreaks at the White House, and a rapidly changing society, perhaps the biggest lesson we learned is that at the end of the day, the things that truly matter the most are family, faith, and good food.

We hope you enjoy our stories, recipes, and cocktails with the people you love.

By Teresa

A t some point in many relationships, couples start to gravitate to longer stays at each others respective homes. First-date drinks give way to dinners, and dinners can lead to late nights, and late nights can lead to weekend trips, and so on. After a while, if youre spending enough time together, it gets exhausting to do the constant back-and-forth to each others places. Well, I had reached that point in my relationship with Brian. We were spending so much time together; we would trade off nights at each others places. We also had reached the stage of knowing that we would get married one day, so this was a serious commitment at this point. (A word of advice: Learn from my past mistakes and wait until you find someone you know youll marry before you move in together. Brian and I officially moved in together after we got engaged.)

This was the beginning of 2020. It was about the time that I started really noticing and thinking about COVID; the nightly news shows were starting to feature its spread in China as a segment. My job at the time was working for Secretary Wilbur Ross at the Department of Commerce, handling advance and protocol for the secretarys travels. And this was a very well-traveled principal and team that allowed me to travel all over the world.

During a trip to Guatemala in January 2020, we had a layover in Atlanta during the return leg. Hartsfield-Jackson is one of the worlds busiest international airports. So of course there were signs everywhere at customs warning about the dangers, symptoms, and possible transmission of the coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China. At the time, only travelers from Wuhan were further screened at customs.

Fast-forward about a month, and my team at Commerce and I were planning our next major swing across the worldand this time, our focus was China. You see, the Department of Commerce is a place where several random priorities of the federal government go to live. The secretary has responsibility not only for many international trade issues, but also for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), fisheries, semiconductors, foreign investments, and more. And at a time when relations with China were at an all-time high in terms of tension, Secretary Ross played an important diplomatic role. Tensions are still high today, and having a secretary with decades of business experience, and immeasurable wealth to show for it, is very helpful in cases like that.

The secretary had been to China on an official visit once before, and some of my teammates knew how to handle the visa process and, subsequently, how the embassy would behave in granting our visas. The visa application for China is long and interrogative. Giving the Chinese government every last detail about your life is unnerving. But as a representative of the U.S. government, I felt that in the end, I would be okay.

My team got together with our chief of staff, Mike Walsh, to discuss the ever-changing plans for our trip. The around-the-world swing would take us from London to Austria (or Geneva), then to Singapore for an international air show, and then to Shanghai and Beijing in China for high-level meetings. There was also talk of tacking on a stop in South Korea at the very end. I got excited for that one, since Im half Korean and was born there.