As she tries to please Mr. Trump, whose media coverage was relentlessly negative, she describes her anger towards herself and others as “terrifying”: she writes: “I began to regret my decision to go in. the west wing. “
She says one of the frequent targets of Mr. Trump’s wrath was Pat Cipollone, who was the White House attorney: “He didn’t like being told that the things he wanted to do were unethical or illegal. So he was yelling at them. But then he usually listened. And then yell at them again later.
(There were other indignities: Ms Grisham writes that Mr Trump called her aboard Air Force One to defend his penis size after Ms Daniels insulted him in an interview. “Uh, yeah sir, “replied Ms Grisham.)
At one point, she writes, Mr. Trump’s managers appointed an anonymous White House official known as “Music Man” to play his favorite show tunes for him, including “Memory” from “Cats.” To pull him from the edge of rage. (The assistant, it is later revealed, is Ms Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She doesn’t identify him, but it’s Max Miller, a former White House official who is now running for Congress with Mr. Trump’s support.)
She was a close observer of Mr. Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia – though she doesn’t name the procedure – because, she reasoned, even temporarily assigning power to the vice president would have been “showing weakness”.
In the end, Ms Grisham stayed there as three chiefs of staff, two press officers and countless other staff resigned. She notes that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her son-in-law, appeared to be getting more powerful.
Ms Trump, she said, insisted on inserting herself into meetings she did not belong to, including when she demanded that her father address the nation from the Oval Office for the first few days. of the pandemic. But Ms Grisham reserves a particular anger for Mr Kushner, whom she calls “Rasputin in a fitted suit”. (At one point, Mr. Trump warns him not to put himself on Mr. Kushner’s bad side.)
