Stephanie Grisham: Trump’s Press Secretary Who Doesn’t Meet the Press

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/business/media/stephanie-grisham-trump-press-secretary.html

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It’s not every day that the White House press secretary is offered $200,000 to appear on camera and explain the president’s decisions — any of them — to the public.

But as one of the most consequential weeks in President Trump’s tenure draws to a close, the world beyond the Beltway is beginning to notice that Stephanie Grisham — unlike her predecessors, colleagues and boss — does not appear to relish the talking-to-the-public part of her job.

In six months as press secretary, Ms. Grisham has held zero briefings for reporters. When she does give interviews, she prefers to leave the West Wing via a side exit and is driven to a studio, rather than walk toward the cameras outside the White House and risk encountering a journalist along the way.

Outside of appearances on Fox News, the One America News Network and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, she rarely goes on TV. Throughout her time in the job, Mr. Trump has wondered why she does not appear on television more often, according to two people familiar with his thinking.

The country’s pre-eminent political spokesperson is virtually unknown to the public. And as the Trump administration scrambled this week to coordinate a public explanation for the killing of an Iranian general, Ms. Grisham kept mostly out of sight. The night that Iran launched missiles into Iraq, she surfaced on Twitter — after a briefing in the Situation Room with the president and other high-level advisers — to accuse CNN of fabricating sources.

Even those sympathetic to the Trump administration seemed befuddled. “If ever there was a time for more briefings, it was the last few days,” said Ari Fleischer, a press secretary to President George W. Bush. He added, though, that briefings had become less useful, given the hostilities between the White House and its press corps.

Ms. Grisham’s under-the-radar style has caused consternation in Washington, where protocol is prized. Now she is facing the kind of scrutiny she has tried to avoid.

On Friday, 13 former White House and military officials — including press secretaries from the three administrations before Trump — published a letter calling for the restoration of press briefings. “Credible men and women, standing in front of those iconic backgrounds at the White House, State Department and Pentagon, are essential to the work the United States must do in the world,” they wrote.

In response, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, dismissed the letter writers as “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”

Ms. Grisham was not cited by name. But on CNN this week, Anderson Cooper devoted a prime-time segment to why taxpayers should pay her $183,000 salary. And in a viral Twitter post, the author Don Winslow pledged to donate $100,000 to charity if Ms. Grisham agreed to answer questions from the White House press corps. The novelist Stephen King tossed another $100,000 into the pot.

Her response was curt.

“If you have $200,000 to play with, why not just help children because it’s a good thing to do?” Ms. Grisham, 43, said in an email to Jake Tapper of CNN.

Ms. Grisham did take questions on Wednesday from the Sinclair anchor Eric Bolling, a former Fox News personality. She accused the media of “mourning” the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and shrugged off skeptics of her low-profile style.

“People aren’t sure of me because I’m not out at the podium, I’m not fighting with them, it’s not public, I’m not giving them their ratings,” she said, adding: “I’m as accessible as I can be.”

It was vintage Trump White House: defiant, scorched-earth and unbothered about offending the journalists she is expected to interact with day to day.

The view inside the White House is that Ms. Grisham — who also serves as communications director for both Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump — has improved her on-camera approach.

In her early days as press secretary, Mr. Trump joked with aides that Ms. Grisham was “a studier,” and that “she learned that from the first lady,” according to a senior administration official who heard the exchange but was not authorized to comment on it publicly.

“When it comes to certain topics I’ve certainly left much of the Q-and-A to subject matter experts,” Ms. Grisham said in an email. “They can answer technical questions and recognize the importance of classified information, which I believe better serves both the press and the public.”

Mick Mulvaney, Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, was one of several White House officials who offered statements on Friday in praise of Ms. Grisham. “Stephanie has been doing exactly what the president wants and needs her to do,” he said. “I continue to be baffled by a press corps that fails to see access to the president as preferable to access to a 20-minute briefing from a spokesperson.”

Mr. Mulvaney added: “We had a great week from a comms perspective.”

Unlike her predecessors, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had relationships with the national press corps after years in high-level politics, Ms. Grisham is a relative newcomer to the world of Washington spin.

An aide in the Arizona House of Representatives, she joined the Trump campaign as a “wrangler,” herding and feeding reporters on the trail. At the White House, she became Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman.

Representing Mr. Trump on the world stage is a different matter. Mr. Spicer and Ms. Sanders faced public scorn and savage “Saturday Night Live” imitations, not to mention the occasional ire of a president who believes he is his own best spokesman.

Ms. Grisham was not spared such scrutiny: Reports surfaced of her two past arrests for driving under the influence. Later, she was praised for physically pushing for press access during a meeting between Mr. Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, on the Korean Peninsula.

Her allies say Ms. Grisham’s reluctance to expand her public profile is reasonable, given the way the job has evolved in the Trump era.

“The job of the press secretary is to speak in the absence of the president,” Mr. Spicer said in an interview, noting that Mr. Trump frequently talks to journalists in informal settings like the Oval Office. “If the president is constantly engaging with the press, there’s not as much need to be out in front.”

Still, Ms. Grisham’s lack of visibility has sparked speculation among allies of the president that she may modify or step back from her role at the conclusion of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. She has said she has no plans to step back.

Allies of Ms. Grisham said she spent a significant amount of her time working with individual reporters, and credited her with organizing an in-flux press shop. But some White House reporters complained that she was less accessible than her predecessors.

Though Ms. Sanders sparred with the press corps, journalists often described her as helpful behind the scenes. Reporters helped organize a cocktail party in her honor when she took the job; after she was mocked at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018, journalists surrounded her at a reception to offer sympathies.

Ms. Grisham has not cultivated that level of respect, but it is not clear she seeks it, either. Inside the West Wing, she is viewed as fiercely loyal to the president and his family — and willing to channel Mr. Trump’s slashing language and laissez-faire approach to facts.

In an op-ed in September for The Washington Examiner, Ms. Grisham singled out The Washington Post for criticism and added a litany of complaints about coverage she deemed biased. “No wonder,” she wrote, with Trumpian flourish, “the national media’s popularity sits somewhere between smallpox and the plague.”