Who is Stephanie Grisham? Is Melania Trump chief of staff reason why FLOTUS losing mag cover to Meghan Markle
Politically, in the US, things are still heated up. President Donald Trump is yet to concede, even though the formal transition has begun and president-elect Joe Biden has been steadily building his team. Now, news comes that members within the White House Trump administration have started blaming each other over various issues.
The first one to come under the spotlight seems to be Stephanie Grisham. She is the chief of staff and press secretary of First Lady Melania Trump. Grisham previously served as White House press secretary and communications director. Miranda Devine wrote a column for New York Post and Grisham was the subject of that. Devine wrote: “With her stylish good looks, straightforward manner and unique migrant life story, Melania Trump should have been a much more popular asset to the administration.” She noted, “It is a measure of the vacuum of the past four years that, despite her impeccable fashion sense, she never appeared on a magazine cover, unlike her predecessors.”
She goes on to claim, “No, the picture that emerges from conversations with insiders who have worked for the White House over the past four years is that the first lady was ill-served by the staffer she trusted most, Stephanie Grisham.” Devine also alleged, “Grisham rarely responds to reporters’ questions or requests for interviews or photo shoots, apart from a handful of favorites, such as Kate Bennett of CNN and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who paradoxically have run the most caustic stories about the first family.”
In the column, she states, “Having eschewed countless offers for positive interviews from American outlets such as Women’s Wear Daily and The Post, Grisham allowed the British magazine Tatler to have the only exclusive interview of the campaign for its November issue. And yet she did not negotiate the cover of the magazine. Instead, Meghan Markle took the honor.” Devine, in conclusion to her column, wrote: “All the people who spoke to me for this column say they are motivated by a desire to save the first lady from keeping Grisham for her post-White House life or to help Melania write her memoirs.”
A senior administration official described the NY Post column to Daily Mail as, “Out of nowhere and a complete hit piece. I’ve been trying to figure out what logic can be in it and I can’t find it. It’s two months until the end of the administration. I really don’t understand where this is coming from there.”
Who is Stephanie Grisham?
According to The Washington Post Magazine, in her nine months on the job as press secretary of White House (July 2019 to April 2020), Grisham never held a White House press briefing. As per the article, on March 13, the president began delivering his own daily Covid-19 briefings. After a few days, she was in quarantine, out of fear that she might have caught the virus at Mar-a-Lago. She tested negative, but after she was back at the White House, incoming chief of staff Mark Meadows was searching for a replacement. By April, Grisham was out. She was named chief of staff to Melania Trump.
Grisham, mother of two and divorced twice, had served as a spokeswoman in Arizona Republican politics. As mentioned in The Washington Post Magazine, according to the New York Times, she was let go from one ad agency after being accused of lifting language from the car club AAA, from which she had been previously let go amid allegations that she had fabricated expense reports. In 2015, she joined Trump’s campaign as a press wrangler, which means she guided reporters to events. Later, she worked for a bit as Sean Spicer’s deputy, and then became Melania’s spokeswoman. The two became close and came to share a defiant attitude toward the press. “I’ve learned from her that we don’t have to tell everybody everything,” Grisham said in ‘Free, Melania’, Kate Bennett’s biography of the first lady. “We just don’t. And it works out fine.”
These remarks were made by a third-person and individual organizations, MEAWW cannot confirm them independently nor does it support these claims. The respective references are linked in the article.