Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday a group of former Trump Administration officials plan to meet next week to coordinate efforts to step her old boss from bringing ‘chaos and destruction’ to the country.
Grisham, who also served as chief of staff to former first lady Melania Trump, said about 15 former White House and other aides had been holding zoom sessions and conference calls to plot strategy.
‘We’re going to talk about how we can formally do some things to try and stop him and also, you know, the extremism that that kind of violence and rhetoric that has been talked about and continues to divide our country,’ she said.
‘I think that there were a few of us, who … have been sitting back watching him continue to manipulate and spread this big lie and continue to harm our country and [we] started some informal chats,’ she told CNN Thursday. ‘And then started throwing around ideas of what we could do, how we could formalize it, started outreach to some other people and then, you know, it’s going to culminate into this meeting next week and we’ll go from there,’ she said.
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said about 15 former aides will meet to try to stop former President Donald Trump. ‘I want people to understand who he is,’ she said
‘I, myself, am hoping to travel the country and talk to people who are believers like I once was, and I want people to understand who he is. He cares about no one but himself,’ she said of Trump – shortly before President Joe Biden would rip his predecessor in a Capitol speech as a ‘defeated former president.’
Grisham served as White House press secretary for about a year without holding a news conference, then quit her post with Melania Trump on Jan. 6, 2020. She wrote a tell-all book last year ripping the former president, and says she wants to do more to get her message out.
She says she wants to try to get to people who believe in Trump.
‘I just think that it will be important for people in this country who are still supporting him to hear from people who actually worked with him day in, day out, worked with a lot of people in his inner circle. We’re not going to just talk about, you know, the former president. We’re going to talk about the people who are surrounding him still now and who they really are,’ she said.
‘I’m hoping that people will talk to somebody like me or some of these other people who really did believe in Trump and understand that you can still be proud of his policies. You can still be behind a lot of the America First policies that he implemented, which I am, but it doesn’t have to be him. It just doesn’t have to be this man who has caused such chaos and destruction in the country,’ Grisham added.
Grisham worked for Trump during the campaign and followed him to the White House
President Joe Biden speaks from Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol to mark the one year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by supporters loyal to then-President Donald Trump, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022. Biden defended the integrity of the election and called Trump a ‘defeated former president’
Grisham said she wanted to get to people who still believe in Trump like she once did
She wrote a tell-all book after she left the White House
The effort appears to be in its infancy, and Grisham did not further describe how it might take place or what it would involve. She said the group numbered ‘about fifteen right now.’
She did answer a question about how Trump might respond with one of his hypothetical barbed releases.
Channeling Trump, she said: ‘This group of losers and RINOs and haters are just coming together because they were so terrible at their jobs. My supporters will stand strong. And, you know, we won’t pay any attention to them. It’s going to be something like that,’ she said. But she said such a statement would just prove ‘he’s more and more concerned.’
She met Wednesday with House Jan. 6 committee. She did not appear to be holding much new information about Trump’s precise actions during the 187 minutes between when rioters stormed the Capitol and when he finally put out a tweet asking them to go home.
She said she didn’t know specifically who pleaded with Trump to take action.
‘I don’t know specifically. I know that Mrs. Trump did not. So there’s that. You know, all I know about that day was that he was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV, as he often did. [Saying to himself]: “Look at all of the people fighting for me.” Hitting rewind, watching it again. That’s what I know.