Stephanie Grisham - Ill Take Your Questions Now

Kurtis and Jake... I love you both more than anything else and am SO PROUD of the people you are. Thank you for making me a mom, it is the best job Ive ever had and has given me happiness I didnt anticipate or maybe deserve. We have so many memories left to make.

Dana... I hope you are proud.

Gramps and my pops... The greatest and most loved men I have ever known.

Heather, Troy, and Erik... Thank you for defending me from snakes and (re)teaching me about real life.

My family near and far... I love all of you and am grateful for whatever part you played in my life.

My circle of trust... You know who you are, and I am beyond blessed to count you as friends. Thank you for your support, especially in the last year.

Dont ever regret knowing someone in your life. Good people will give you happiness, bad people will give you experience, while the worst people will give you a lesson and the best people will always give you memories.

Author Unknown

You cant go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

ATTRIBUTED TO C.S. LEWIS

I could start this book any number of ways. I could tell you about the way Vladimir Putin toyed with the president of the United States by using a very attractive translator at one of their meetings or when there was a fight with Chinese security during a trip to Beijing and the nuclear football was in the middle of it. Or when President Trump, a solemn, intense look crossing his face, leaned toward me on board Marine One to ask me the most pressing question on his mind: Are your teeth real? Or when Mrs. Trump enlisted her staff to reenact a White House event at the new tennis court shed had remodeled so she could get a better photo of herself for her photo albums. Those albumsthose many, many albumsyou are going to be hearing about them in this book. Or election night 2020, when President Trump was being advised by a bunch of aides and randosHey there, Laura Ingraham!on how to respond to what everyone knew, but pretended they didnt, was a defeat. Spoiler alert: that didnt work out too well. Then there were all of Jared Kushners schemes and seemingly shady dealings and the Princess (as the first lady and I, among others, called Ivanka Trump) trying to grab all the face time with Queen Elizabeth, her fellow royal.

For nearly six years I was as close to the Trump family as anyone could be. I saw everything. I saw it all. I saw so much that I forgot some of it until I started writing this bookwhich you will see is part chronicle of a chaotic administration, part therapy session, and part personal reckoning. I have to get this all out so I can process, in my own mind, what the hell happened.

But maybe the best way to start this story is with the ending.

On January 6, 2021, after several botched attempts, I finally left the Trump administration. To put it another way, I resigned as not only the first ladys chief of staff but one of the longest-serving hangers-on with the Trump family over the past six years. They didnt like that too much. Immediately my official phone was cut off and I was placed on a Do Not Admit list at the White House. That was something. That crowd couldnt do anything fast or efficientlyexcept when it came to petty revenge. We were really very good at that.

I WILL BE CALLED many names for writing this book. Traitor. Low-level staffer. Weak. Dishonest. Ineffective. A complete failure. Anonymous sources will label me an alcoholic or someone with addiction issues (I know because this has already happened with the press). Statements will go out that I want attention and am self-serving, a person who wants to profit off the Trump family. More anonymous sources will follow up to say that I was never loyal and leaked to the pressthe biggest sin of all in the Trump administration. The president and maybe even the first lady will pretend they hardly knew me or they will sue meor both. I know all of this, because that is what we did to everyone else who decided to tell their truth or who stood up against things they thought were wrong. It is what I did, personally, to many people because it is the Trump formula: when youre in, youre in, and when youre outyoure denied and then destroyed. Its something of poetic justice, I guess, that I was once a destroyer myself.

I had been with the Trump family almost from the beginning of their political crusademaybe the only person in history who worked at the most senior levels at the same time for the president and his wife. I spent nearly every holiday with them and flew with them all over the world. I was with the boss in private meetings with foreign leaders where he would say the most bonkers things and also, to be fair, often fight hard for our country. I was his spokeswoman during the (first) impeachment when he tried to get me to humiliate myself in front of the press and I had to trick him out of it. I was involved in standoffs with members of the Trump family over one thing or another. And I became a confidante of his wife, along with her two children: her son and her photo collection. (She loved her son the most.)

BUT BACK TO THE horror that was January 6, 2021.

Each time I tried to leave the White House for one reason or another, the first lady, whom I felt close to and protective of, talked me out of it. She was very persuasive, including with her husband. At least sometimes. But she couldnt talk me out of leaving that day.

Id had a sick feeling in my stomach all morning, which was unusual. After five years of being immersed in all things Trump, you grew immune to chaos. Even in a weird way comfortable with it. There became something almost soothing about the knowledge that you are simply captive to a whirlwind you cant ever controlso you sit back, focus on staying alive, and let the winds take you where they will. In fact, the longer I was there, a sick pride built in me that I had outlasted so many others. What should have been warning signs were twisted into badges of honor.

Still, there was something different in the air this time. I just felt it.

Then I saw it.

I watched as a group of very angry and frenzied people scaled the walls of our Capitol, egged on by the president and his months of conspiracy mongering (thanks, Rudy). They were on their way to behead Mike Pence, kill AOC, or arrest Nancy Pelosi. Who the hell knew? It was scary and sad and sick and in some ways inevitable, I guess. Of course this was how it was all going to end.

Still, I had a job to do. I was the first ladys top aide, so I texted her. She had often been the sensible one. She had been the first to react to the violent clashes in Charlottesville, and how many times had we worked together and occasionally even succeeded in getting the president to dial back his rhetoric, to calm one situation or another? Id lost count. I suggested that we send out a tweet immediately calling for an end to the violence and urging people to stand down. At 1:25 p.m., I texted her, Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?

From the Executive Residence of the White House, literally one minute later and while she was preparing a photo shoot of a new rug she had selectedyes, you read that rightMelania Trump sent me back a one-word response: No.

I looked at that for a minute. A long minute. Then I looked at the TV again.

No.

So many times over the years I had pushed back on the caricature of Melania Trump as some sort of Marie Antoinette, cold and cruel and oblivious to the little people over whom her husband ruled. That was not the woman I knew and admired and even had affection for. But that day, as the city of Washington, DC, descended into violence that had once seemed unimaginable, I finally saw the doomed French queen. Dismissive. Defeated. Detached.