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The Bonus Book of the Week is “I’ll Take Your Questions Now, What I Saw at the Trump White House” by Stephanie Grisham, published in 2021.
This is yet one more volume penned by a Trump-administration insider. As is well known, president Trump’s White House embodied all of the contemporary Washington, D.C. cliches— excuse the cliche– on steroids.
It takes a certain kind of person to want to work for someone like Donald Trump. He or she is a star-struck social climber. The female especially, must have low self-esteem, and if she works closely enough with the president and endures his abuse and does not resign immediately or start looking for work elsewhere– she has a version of battered woman syndrome. The author was one such individual.
According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index), the hostile work environment became even moreso when chief of staff Mark Meadows came to power.
Pursuant to the way they are raised (translation: family dynamics), people gravitate toward relationships, situations and environments with which they feel comfortable. Employees in Trump’s orbit formed a dysfunctional family comfortable for them. Yet it was a place with sky-high turnover because it was full of workaholics who behaved like extremely self-absorbed, socially manipulative teenagers who thought they were starring in their own reality show; and they were– it’s called social media.
Just two of numerous episodes included:
In 2018, a top adviser to national security adviser John Bolton launched a witch hunt. It was alleged that twelve American political workers (including the author, a communications director) engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior at a social gathering abroad. After the author put out a statement saying the adviser needed to be fired because nothing happened at that gathering, “Three minutes passed, and it was all over Twitter and within ten it was on TV.”
In 2020, the president’s then-wife Melania Trump was infuriated by former communications adviser Stephanie Winston-Wolkoff, who published a tell-all book on her employment experiences, and was selling audiotapes of their conversations.
Read the book to learn how the author experienced the way the president, his daughter and son-in-law were actually running the country; and what the president’s then-wife was doing in the meantime.