Sorry, Stephanie Grisham, you are not redeemed

 From Frank Bruni's (NYT columnist) newsletter (9/30/2021) via email

Ben Wiseman

I did not and will not crack open the cover of Stephanie Grisham’s White House memoir, but yesterday I read sneak peeks and synopses of it, and there was a moment — a horrifying moment — when I warmed to her. It was when I learned that Grisham, the White House press secretary from July 2019 to April 2020, used the book to characterize Jared Kushner as “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.”

I wish that I’d come up with that line, back when I was regularly writing about Kushner and the whole miserable lot of them.

I wish that Grisham had possessed the courage to call out Kushner in real time, when it mattered much more.

But no. She was too busy savoring her perks, relishing her access, enjoying the roller coaster ride. She was in crowded company that way, and the size and tenacity of that crowd are what has always bothered me more than the reckless actions and rancid character of the president — I’ll spare you his name — whom that crowd was serving. After all, the world is full of bad apples, some of whom are bound to wind up at the summit of government, their ascent in fact served by their wormy foulness. I’ve always been aware of that.

But I sometimes forget that a whole wretched orchard can take shape, one on the scale of the administration in which Grisham worked. And that’s the more disturbing part, because it shows how very widespread human rottenness can be.

I’m deliberately omitting the title of Grisham’s book. I refuse to plug it, and no matter how keen your curiosity, you should refuse to buy it. Her (profitable) candor now is inadequate atonement for her complicity then. It shouldn’t be rewarded. Besides, the book is as superfluous as it is self-serving: Anyone who has been paying any attention to the news and to the veritable library of tell-alls so far has more than enough evidence of how unhinged the 45th president of the United States could be and how much of a danger he posed — and still poses — to our democracy. You can responsibly turn a blind eye and deaf ear to what Grisham has to say.

But not to what Grisham represents, which is how deep people will bury their consciences when it plumps up their egos, professional statures, bank accounts. When it’s exciting. When it’s high-wire. She saw how shallow Trump was, but she continued to serve him. She saw how tempestuous, and just kept forging ahead. She saw how indulgent of Vladimir Putin he could be, and she found a way not to care.

She saw, in other words, what scores of other sycophants did — hundreds if we count craven Republican lawmakers inside and outside the Beltway — and did what they did: calculated that it was to her immediate benefit to look away. As I said, I haven’t read the book; maybe she offers some rationale, as many of those other enablers do, and claims that a few of the president’s priorities were absolutely vital to the nation or that he was holding back some socialist tide.

Stephanie Grisham and Jared Kushner, on Oct. 27, 2020.Al Drago for The New York Times

Please. The offense of that president’s conduct and the peril he posed trumped all else. And, no, the verb in that last sentence doesn’t count as a violation of my name-avoidance pledge. It deserves to be redeemed, even if Grisham doesn’t.

At the same time that snippets of her book were leaking out, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was testifying before Congress and answering questions about his behind-the-scenes efforts to contain the commander in chief — to head him off at the pass, essentially. The revelation of those efforts has driven the likes of Tucker Carlson to derangement, which is reason enough to applaud them.

Milley embodies the alternative to Grisham: someone who, though nominated by that president, realized that loyalty to him must have its limits and that those limits had been reached. Someone who factors the national interest into the equation. A patriot.

I mean to be neither naïve nor simplistic. Too many government officials too frequently picking when to support a president and when not to creates the possibility of chaos. But there are also extraordinary circumstances.

And I’m not painting Milley as a hero through and through. He has matters — Afghanistan, for example — to explain. And his leaking to journalists about his babysitting of the president probably had a measure of vanity in it. He wanted credit.

But that babysitting couldn’t have been comfortable or easy, and he did what needed to be done in real time. He didn’t merely bide his time, like Grisham, who’s rebelling only now that it’s convenient. “Rasputin” — that’s funny at first blush, but outrageous and sad at second, because what she’s describing is the amorality she enabled.