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October 6, 2021

Stephanie Grisham called out by Steve Scalise for bold-faced lie in her anti-Trump tell-all book

By Monica Showalter

Among the string of jerks who resigned from President Trump's administration in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, leaving their colleagues to do all their work while they attempted to rejoin the swamp, Stephanie Grisham, an ex-White House press secretary and ex-press secretary to Melania Trump, was one of them.

Now she's got a tell-all book out, looking to make some money off her eight-years-in-the-Trump administration experience, and more likely to sidle back into the good graces of news outlets such as MSNBC, possibly to win a commentator slot. Tell-all books are useful vehicles for that.

But is she telling all? Turns out she's making things up.

According to Business Insider:

A new book says Melania Trump refused to meet with Republican Rep. Steve Scalise at the White House after he was shot in 2017 at a congressional baseball practice.

Insider obtained a copy of the coming book by Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary who also served as the first lady’s chief of staff. She wrote that Scalise and his family had gone to the White House for an unscheduled visit shortly after Scalise had recovered from the shooting.

Grisham wrote that Trump’s staff asked her whether Melania wanted to visit the Scalises, who Grisham said were gathered in the Blue Room, and that Melania declined.

“Her response was, ‘No, I already said hello,'” Grisham wrote. Trump was apparently referring to when she and President Donald Trump visited Scalise at the hospital as he was recovering from the shooting.

Which according to Scalise, was false:

Scalise told Insider in a statement that he and his family never visited the White House after his hospitalization. 

"President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump graciously gave my family a tour of the White House after I was shot in 2017, while I was still recovering in the hospital," he said. "My family and I never went to the White House for an unscheduled visit following my release from the hospital. The fact that Ms. Grisham needs to make up verifiably false stories about a recovering shooting victim and his family to paint a false picture of President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump is disgusting, and should tell you everything you need to know about the credibility of this book."

Scalise documented it with a tweet showing the actual photos from the visit:

So what the hell was she talking about? She seems to be trying to perpetuate an already-favorite trope of the left that Melania Trump is some kind of compassionless ice princess with indifference to her duties as the first lady in the Trump White House. Her gracious record as the first lady never supported that slimy stereotype, but Grisham seems to want to impress the leftist talk shows now, so she's giving them what they want. Truth is secondary.

That revelation from Scalise pretty well discredits her whole book. Because a bald-faced lie like that can't be explained away easily. One wonders what other lies are seeded throughout the book to impress the talks? I sure as heck wouldn't buy it; this is a book with an unreliable narrator.

This isn't her first lie, which is another credibility killer. All presidential press secretaries skirt around the truth to some extent as public relations professionals, it's the nature of that business, but this is not about skirting.

In her quest to impress the leftist network media, she said this:

So now we are supposed to believe she has had some kind of epiphany on the matter of truth as she comes to the left for absolution? Don't make me barf.

Actually, to read her Wikipedia page, she's always been kind of a rough character. I had always been under the impression that she was one of the Manhattan fashion model types who are seen often around Trump, but she's more of a hardscrabble opportunist, an ambitious underachiever who never managed to make it through state college. She must have had some kind of talent to have gotten where she has gone but she has a persistent history of situational ethics, doing what she needs to do and saying what she needs to say to advance. She's not someone who can rely on her credentials or alumni networks for support -- she doesn't have any. She's gotten around that by biting and clawing her way to the top.

According to Wikipedia's "Career" section for Grisham:

Grisham was the spokeswoman for AAA Arizona in 2007,[18] but was fired within a year after being accused of cheating on expense reports.[19] Grisham was fired from a subsequent job at ad agency Mindspace over plagiarism charges, copying AAA material verbatim into her client's web page.[19]

From 2008 to 2010, Grisham worked as a spokeswoman for the Arizona Charter Schools Association.[17][19] There she met Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public schools. From about 2011 to 2014, Grisham served as spokeswoman for Tom Horne after he was elected Arizona attorney general.[17] She witnessed the 2014 execution of Joseph Wood and controversially claimed that the two hour ordeal had been "quite peaceful" despite contrary observations.[20][21][22]

After Republican Mark Brnovich defeated Horne in the 2014 GOP primary, Grisham worked as a spokesperson for the Arizona House of Representatives Republican caucus.[17] She revoked the Arizona Capitol Times's press credentials hours after their reporting that the House speaker, David Gowan, had traveled at state taxpayers' expense during his campaign for Congress.[17][23] Reporters refused to comply, and Gowan rescinded the order.[17][19]

Wikipedia also reports that her personal life has been chaotic, with multiple marriages and a child born out of wedlock. There's also this white-trash-style stuff:

On January 9, 2013, Grisham was pulled over for speeding in Gilbert, Maricopa County, Arizona. The officer observed Grisham's signs of intoxication, and she failed a field sobriety test. Grisham denied consuming any alcohol, but said she had taken a Xanax 90 minutes earlier and a Zoloft the prior night. A blood test revealed Grisham's blood alcohol content to be .105 percent, which is above the .08 legal limit in Arizona. She also was found to be driving on a suspended license since August 2012 for failure to answer a traffic citation. In August 2014, Grisham accepted a plea bargain agreement that reduced the charge to misdemeanor reckless driving, plus two years of probation.[17][7][65] She returned to court twice for failure to pay the $779 in fines and failure to complete a Mothers Against Drunk Driving program.[17]

Shortly after midnight, December 5, 2015, Grisham was arrested again in Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona for driving without her headlights and suspicion of driving under the influence; thus violating her probation.[17] Grisham failed to appear at her court hearing on January 19, 2016,[17] whereupon the judge issued a warrant for her arrest.[65] Afterwards, Grisham pleaded guilty. In July 2016, she was ordered into a treatment program and to pay nearly $1,600 in court costs and fines.[17][7][19][65]

Now, everyone has miserable stuff in their past, and the people who put this kind of information up on Wikipedia are absolutely malevolent. But all of this stuff shows that lies have been a pretty useful thing to her in her past and she's employed them in one form or another fairly frequently in her career.

The fact that she wouldn't hold press conferences as White House Communications Director is worth a second look now that she's written this tell-all book to make her pile, too. Did she do that with advance plans to rejoin the swamp, and maybe get a television commentator slot? Goodness knows she didn't serve President Trump well by that bad decision, given that he hires these people to go out there and combat the biased media.

It almost looks like she was describing herself when she spoke of why she refused to hold press conferences as White House communications director, blaming the press.

According to Wikipedia:

On September 23, 2019, when asked by the hosts of Fox & Friends if the White House planned to resume its daily press briefing, Grisham said "not right now... I mean, ultimately, if the president decides that it's something we should do, we can do that, but right now he's doing just fine. And to be honest, the briefings have become a lot of theater. And I think that a lot of reporters were doing it to get famous. I mean, yeah, they're writing books now. I mean, they're all getting famous off of this presidency. And so, I think it's great what we're doing now."[38]

So now she's doing the same stuff to "get famous. She was hired to communicate with the press but argued she didn't need to, which left the media to make up its own narratives and encouraged them to cultivate leakers instead. Did she do that so as to preserve her 'viability' with the talk show networks and so secure a television commentator slot? It would comport with her hasty "protest" resignation over the Capitol riot, a time when she should have been standing by Trump in his last few days. It also would comport with this Scalise lie, which seems to have been told to reinforce leftist media narratives.

One wonders now if this was the plan all along -- trashing the Trumps to get ahead. Well, we can hope that plan is squelched now that Scalise has exposed this lie and the more that are sure to roll out.

Hat tip: The Right Scoop

Image: Screen shot from CNN video, posted on YouTube

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