Toadstool Dicks and Soothing Show Tunes: New Book Details More Trump White House Insanity
Stephanie Grisham never held a press briefing during the nearly 10 months she served as President Trump’s press secretary, but in her new book I’ll Take Your Questions Now, she’s delivering what appears to be a pretty damn unvarnished account of her time in the White House. In it, Grisham details a president who leered at female staffers, required live show tunes to calm his nerves, and who once called Grisham to defend his penis after it had been called into question by Stormy Daniels, the porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair.
“Uh, yes sir,” Grisham writes of her reply when Trump called her while aboard Air Force One to defend the size and shape of his penis. Daniels wrote in her 2018 book that Trump’s penis was shaped like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart,” Toad, who is shaped like a toadstool.
Perhaps even more bizarre than the call to defend his penis is the revelation that Trump’s aides designated a White House official, known as the “Music Man,” to calm the president’s nerves by playing his favorite show tunes, including “Memory” from Cats. (In all fairness, it is pretty soothing.)
According to The New York Times, the “Music Man” is Max Miller, an ex-boyfriend of Grisham’s who is running for Congress in Ohio with Trump’s support. Politico reported on Miller’s history of aggressive behavior this summer, including slapping Grisham. “Great guy,” Trump said of Miller at a rally in June.
Not quite so amusing as Trump’s taste for show tunes is his behavior toward women. Grisham writes that the president often invited a young press aide onto Air Force One to “look at her,” and that he instructed Grisham to “keep her happy.” Grisham also writes that during a rant in the Oval Office, Trump looked her in the eye and instructed her to deny any wrongdoing with regard to E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who in 2019 accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s. “‘You just deny it,'” Grisham writes that he told her, according to the Times. “‘That’s what you do in every situation. Right, Stephanie? You just deny it,’ he repeated, emphasizing the words.”
Grisham also writes that Trump only acted tough toward Putin — on the rare occasions that he did — to placate the media. Trump told Putin as much during the 2019 G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan. “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes,” Grisham overheard Trump tell the Russian president. “But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”
She also recalled a conservation during the same summit with Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council senior director for Russia who later testified during Trump’s impeachment hearing, about how Putin may have been trying to manipulate Trump. “Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure,” Grisham writes. “She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president.”
Trump, of course, has categorically denied everything in the book, while bashing Grisham. “Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” he wrote in a statement provided to the Times. “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
Grisham is clearly using the book to distance herself from Trump’s actions, and writes that she never held a press briefing because she “knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic.”
Regardless of how disgusted Grisham may have been by Trump’s actions, she spent nearly a year defending this “lunatic,” a fact that no amount of salacious gossip or details about his tyrannical behavior offered up to the media will ever change.