Who is Stephanie Grisham? Donald Trump names new press secretary

Sarah Sanders is being replaced by top aide
to the first lady

In Depth

Grisham is stepping up as press secretary after Sarah Sanders announced her
resignation from the role earlier this month. In addition,
Grisham will serve as director of communications, a
role formerly held by Bill Shine, who departed the White House
in March. 

And to top it off, she will keep her current job,
too, according to The Guardian. 

To some, Grisham’s promotions make “total and complete sense”,
says CNN. As the news network notes, she “has been a
member of Trumpworld since the summer of 2015, when she signed on
as travelling press secretary”, and the president “always
favours those who have displayed the most loyalty to him”.

But Quartz suggests that Grisham is “an unusual
choice to represent the nerve centre of the world’s biggest economy
and most powerful military”, given the “first lady’s rocky
relationship with the press and her falling approval ratings during
Grishman’s tenure”.

So who is Stephanie Grisham?

The 42-year-old is “one of the last remaining aides from the
presidential campaign who still serves in the White House”, the
BBC reports. After Trump was elected, Grisham joined
the new president’s press office as a deputy to then-press
secretary Sean Spicer, before being promoted to her
current role a few months later.

Since then, she has cemented her reputation as a fiercely loyal
PR expert for both the president and his wife.

In June 2017, Trump faced a public outcry after tweeting that
MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift”.
Grisham rushed to defend his remarks, saying in a statement on
behalf of the first lady: “When her husband gets attacked, he will
punch back ten times harder.”

A year later, Grisham came out fighting once again, after
Melania Trump wore a jacket emblazoned with the words, “I
don’t care, do you?”, while visiting an immigration detention
centre in Texas. The first lady’s choice of outfit fuelled anger
amid “a national outcry over the Trump administration’s policy of
separating hundreds of kids from their parents on the border”,
reports Quartz. 

The “tone-deaf fashion statement seemed
like something her public relations staff could have prevented”,
the news site adds. But Grisham hit back at the critics, saying the
media should focus on her employer’s “actions and efforts to
help kids” rather than her clothes.

This defensive approach is nothing new to Grisham. Her previous
roles including handling press for Tom Horne, then attorney general
for Arizona, when it was “alleged that he essentially ran his 2014
re-election campaign out of his official office while paid by
taxpayers”, says Sky News.

“She aggressively defended Mr Horne, denying that his staff had
violated laws that ban campaigning using public money,” the
broadcaster adds.

Grisham also worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign,
and before that ran her own small public relations firm and worked
as a spokesperson for US organisations including the American
Automobile Association (AAA).

What kind of press secretary will she make?

Experts are torn over whether Grisham will re-expand the scope
of the White House press secretary role, after Sanders sought to
whittle down her duties.

Yahoo! News reports that after taking over
from Spicer in July 2017, Sanders succeeded in “virtually ending
the practice of regular public briefings that were a major
responsibility of her predecessors”.

Indeed, on the day Grisham was announced as her successor,
Sanders had not briefed reporters in the White House briefing room
for more than 100 days.

Sanders’ impending departure has also triggered a flood of
stories “about all the times she has lied or misrepresented the
truth when speaking to the press”, adds Vice News.

Sources told Yahoo! News that the White House would probably
“continue this approach”, with Grisham continuing to act as an
“aggressive defender”.

CNN agrees that Trump’s time in office has only “reaffirmed his
distrust” of the media and outsiders, and “convinced him that he
can only really trust the people who were with him from the
beginning”.

But other commentators believe Grisham may seek to improve White
House relations with the press. According to
The Washington
Post, her experience in PR has helped her form a
good rapport with White House reporters.

Yahoo News! points out that during the 2016
election and the presidential transition, she did “press advance
work and spent extended periods of time with the reporters on the
Trump beat”.

Speaking about her time with Trump’s press corps, Grisham has
said: “We would wake up together in the same hotel, we would
fly on the same airplane together, we would end up night together
at the same hotel.”