Stephanie Grisham was, at various points, Donald Trump’s press secretary and Melania Trump’s chief of staff. Grisham was a true insider, and she was there for nearly the entire “Trump administration.” She only quit her job following the January 6th insurrection, which should tell you a lot. Anyway, Grisham has written a memoir about the Trump years and it’s been widely excerpted in recent weeks. We heard stories about how Melania flatly refused to tell insurrectionists to stand down on January 6th. We heard stories about how Donald Trump sexually harassed female staffers and how he once called up Grisham to talk about his toadstool. Some of the latest excerpts involve Grisham trying to capture just how f–king weird and lazy Melania was during her entire time in the White House. Some highlights:
Melania’s nickname: Grisham reveals much of what she saw of a first lady the Secret Service nicknamed “Rapunzel,” The Washington Post reports, because like the beautiful woman trapped in a tower, Mrs. Trump rarely left the confines of the White House. Agents even requested the assignment of protecting the first lady because it allowed them more time with their families, Grisham alleges in the book.
The infamous “I really don’t care do U” jacket: There’s an entire chapter in the book about Mrs. Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket she wore to visit migrant children in Texas, according to the Post. Grisham reportedly writes that she was too busy organizing the trip to keep the first lady from wearing the $39 Zara jacket on the well-photographed stop at the border with Mexico. Back at the White House, Grisham writes — according to The New York Times — she and Mrs. Trump were in the Oval Office when the president asked, “What the hell were you thinking?” He later decided to say in a tweet that the jacket’s message was directed at the “Fake News Media.”
Melania Unleashed: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the allegations that followed from other women,” Grisham reportedly writes, “I felt that Mrs. Trump was basically unleashed.” Taking the arm of a military aide hand-selected for his good looks at her husband’s State of the Union address, cropping the president out of photos she posted and leaving him out of her tweets were ways Mrs. Trump tried to needle her husband, according to reports about the book.
Melania’s final days in the White House: As the presidency progressed and came to an end, Grisham reportedly claims Mrs. Trump was more disinterested in doing what was expected of her. Sleeping through election night and attending a photo shoot of a rug on Jan. 6 — while declining to comment on the attack at the U.S. Capitol that day — are cited as examples.
Mel loves a photoshoot: Mrs. Trump, a former model, apparently never lost interest in photo shoots, however. According to the Post’s report on I’ll Take Your Questions Now, she spent hours recreating a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the White House tennis pavilion because she didn’t get the right shots weeks earlier and wanted different photos. Grisham even reportedly refers to the first lady’s photo albums as one of “her two children.”
I’m left feeling that Melania is just a profoundly weird person. It’s not that she’s a shell of her former self – I think this is just who she is. She didn’t want to do anything so she didn’t. She didn’t want to leave the White House so she didn’t. She wanted to arrange photoshoots for her personal photo albums and that’s what she did. People wanted to ascribe all of these motivations (both good and bad) to Melania throughout her husband’s time in the White House, but really… she was just this vapid woman who never gave a sh-t.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Backgrid and Avalon Red.
“[…]she was just this vapid woman who never gave a sh-t.”
And this is why she was an aspirational figure to so many women in America, and that is saying A LOT about our society, none of it good.
Oh, the Trumper women LOOOVE her. That does say a lot about them as people. Of course, they love him too. How stupid can some people get?
It says that cult membership requires reverence of two garbage human beings who deserve each other.
They don’t love her. She doesn’t have any kind of stan base. They simply love what she represents. She’s America’s Kate Middleton.
Agreed with Nyro. Right-wingers/MAGAs will say positive things about women who are adjacent to the demagogues they worship — women like Melania, Hope Hicks, Ivanka, Casey DeSantis, etc. But they don’t actually like them for their personalities, intelligence, or accomplishments; they see them as extensions of their idols. Also, all four of these women meet the conservative standard of beauty and all of them used plastic surgery to achieve their looks. So at most, they are admired for maintaining their looks.
History shows that these women can be dropped like a bad habit if the demagogue chooses to do so.
There is a subset of society that admires women who achieve high-status lifestyles just on using their looks alone. However, I am not sure the Trumpers admired her as much as they were willing to accept her because she was an extension of him. Unlike Ivanka, she didn’t really share political opinions or favor social issues (and on the occasion she did, she spewed racist birther nonsense). She dressed nice and was occasionally stood by his side at events. Like a certain Duchess, she was a cipher, specifically for the MAGA crowd. Had Trump ever turned on her, they would have too.
Melania Trump == Kate Middleton…..I don’t know how a woman can go to school, educate herself and yet still be so vapid or incurious or just plain stupid
How can you live in a world like we all do, and still not care care about what’s going on around you?
Well at least Melania used to work!
I wish that whole family of jackals would just disappear.
Yeah, I think people want to think there is more to Melania than there is. “Vapid” is a great word for her – there is truly nothing there. She’s selfish and self-absorbed and utterly without depth. She isn’t as sinister as her husband, because that would require some substance. It doesn’t mean she’s nice, though, either. She’s completely lost in her own superficial world.
…and for years the press tried to make her happen, give her some substance, some semblance of higher thought, and she cared only about photoshoots, and occasionally about photoshoots with rugs.
To be fair, no woman of substance would have married Trump.
“Sleeping through election night,” lol. That’s a nice way of saying she took more roxicodones than usual to avoid Donald’s tantrum when he lost.
Only cares about Barron, money and looks. Can u imagine if she gets to Pearly Gates and have to account for her deeds?
Orange Ball married Rapunzel as a trophy wife, her aspirations was to be rich and pretty and do nothing that would make her life hard, like work, think & speak. At no time she had ambitions other than be lazy all life, although she probably takes good care of her son. Being first lady was a nightmare for her and the worst scenario.
LOL at “Rapunzel”
I just refuse to believe she and Baron lived at 1600. I still think they lived with her parents on the Potomac or Bedminster.
That is why staff rarely, if ever, saw her.
I believe that too. There were never any candid shots of either of them walking around the grounds – sometimes you do have to just leave the house. And she was completely missing from many events or events were canceled completely because she didn’t want to do them.
I thought that was a given that they didn’t live there, that they lived with her parents and she only showed up at the WH for some photo op.
I do wonder if her parents neighbors ever noticed anything.
I hate how Trump knew he could always throw the media under the bus. His go to solution to any bad press was to say it was all fake. The more Trump and Melania’s unpresidential behaviour was called out (as it was and as it happened) the more he kept deflecting blame back on to the press for making stuff up. And his supporters began to believe that Trump must have been railroaded and lied about because… how could a president truly be so callous, indecent, ignorant and unqualified. The definition of gaslighting. And now half the population of the US does not believe what is happening before their very eyes. Trump’s damage is so far-reaching, so indelible. And it is echoing through Biden’s presidency. He cannot lead a nation where half the population won’t listen… won’t shake themselves from this stupor they let themselves fall into.
I hate Trump. I hate Melania. I hate them all with a fire that will not die.
As a foreigner living in this country I said it pre-election night, the citizens of this country are living through post-narcissistic abuse. Half figured it out and spoke up and acted out, or are just gobsmacked at what has happened and still trying to make sense of it all. The other half has been successfully gaslit and struggling with the aftermath of his web of lies. This is a case of textbook narcissistic abuse against an entire nation complete with flying monkeys, narcissistic supply, discarding, narcissistic rage. I have had waves of horror as I saw similarities to my own experience with a narcissist. But that’s what makes all of this so hard, just like my situation I may have been the target but others were affected whether they extended his abuse until I had to leave our entire social group or received it themselves as a result of his loss of control. In this country people were duped, used in his abuse to extend it and some still don’t know their part in or how they have been treated in it.😓
Melanie is indeed weird. It’s been written that she has no real friends. The only people she’s ever around are her parents, her sister, and her kid. Baron was also isolated as a child which is why he used to speak English with a Slovenian accent. I don’t think she’s lonely or has issues with anxiety tho. I just think she hates people and doesn’t care about anything outside of herself and her tiny family circle.
I read some of that memoir by another Melania-adjacent…Stephanie Winston Wolkoff maybe? And it was striking that she considered herself close friends with Melania yet Melania had never bothered to visit her house and she eventually realizes that Melania did not even bother to know her kids names. Agree Melania is a deeply weird human and cares about pampering herself (she’s reported to spend most days now receiving spa treatments at Mar a Lago) gilding her lifestyle and being with her son and her parents and sister. And that is all there is to her.
But I thought vampires slept in the daytime…
LOL gets used too freely…..this was a legit LOL for me =)
I love these excerpts. I really do. They make me feel all the more grateful for the course correction my country did almost a year ago and gave us the wonderful educated, professional, involved First Lady Dr Jill Biden.
I don’t think she’s stupid, but I do think she only cares about a very narrow set of things, and many of them are superficial.
So vapid is probably the right description, but it’s probably not due to lack of capacity, just lack of interest. She’ll fake some things, but only when it makes her life easier; she’s perfectly willing to demonstrably not give a shit.
those eyebrows, JFC