Who the hell is Stephanie Grisham?
As Press Secretary to Donald Trump and his pirate ship administration for the past 198 days (as I write this), Stephanie Ann Grisham has held exactly two fewer press conferences than she has had DUIs. She has exactly two more failed marriages than she has held press conferences. She has been accused of (and twice fired for) three more acts of plagiarism than she has held press conferences. All this at the tender age of 43 and for the low, low price of $183,000 dollars a year, the latter compliments of your tax dollars.
So it is little wonder that Stephanie Grisham should be a regular guest on Fox News, as luck would have it, in lieu of prison. When she isn’t calling anyone who would object to the criminal antics of her boss “human scum,” she is deriding them for wanting to know why Donald Trump would retweet a racist meme depicting Democratic leaders in Muslim garb.
The very idea that the man who tried to ban all Muslims from entering the United States (except the ones from countries where he had business interests) was being racist in intent with the retweet, Grisham maintains, is ludicrous. “I think the president is making clear that the Democrats have been parroting Iranian talking points and almost taking sides of the terrorists and those who were out to kill the Americans,” Grisham told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner recently, “I think the president was making the point that the Democrats seem to hate him so much that they are willing to be on the side of countries and leadership of countries who want to kill Americans.” In other words, wearing Muslim garb is the exact same thing as being a terrorist. How exactly that is not anything but virulent racism is something that a three strikes plagiarist and two times drunk driver cannot adequately explain, not even with the added incentive of $183,000 a year.
But this was Fox News, and naturally Grisham was tossed nothing but softballs. Her inability to hit them out of the park notwithstanding is also a testament to the toxicity of the man she is defending.
Defending bad people is Grisham’s stock-in-trade. After being fired from AAA for allegedly doctoring her expense account, she was then fired from MINDSPACE for allegedly plagiarizing parts of AAA’s website onto a presentation for one of MINDSPACE’s clients. It was then that Grisham decided she was ready for Republican politics. She volunteered for Mitt Romney’s team in 2012, then viciously attacked him when he lost. Then in 2013 Grisham took a job as spokesperson for Arizona’s Attorney General Tom Horne, a man who proposed legislation in Arizona to arm teachers, and threatened to sue a city in the state for recognizing same sex marriages. Next, as spokesperson for Arizona assembly speaker of the house David Gowan, Grisham revoked the press pass of a reporter mere hours after he penned an article critical of Gowan. This brought her to the attention of Trump. With her anti-freedom of the press bona fides, Grisham was a natural.
Grisham began life in the illicit Trump regime as Melania’s press secretary. She helped draft Melania’s heavily plagiarized speech to the Republican National Committee. Grisham was also instrumental in assisting the First Lady with her “Be Best” program, a program with the principal aim of fighting cyber bullying. (Melania Trump was and remains one of the world’s leading experts on cyber bullying, being married to one of cyber bullying’s chief exponents.) Grisham’s job was to design a brochure for the campaign, one she heavily plagiarised from an Obama-era brochure.
Grisham’s obscenely dishonest and loathsome record at everything she he’s put her hand to has made her ideal for Trumpland. It appears that press conferences have been permanently cancelled at the White House. Thankfully, at least, the podium made radioactive by Sarah Huckabee Sanders will never be further blasphemed by Stephanie Grisham, yet another deplorable addition to the toxic Trump assembly of his “best people.”
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.