President Donald Trump has found a replacement for outgoing White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Stephanie Grisham, who has been serving as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director since March 2017. British journalist Mehdi Hasan, who now lives in Washington, D.C., asserts in a June 26 article for The Intercept that Grisham is ideal for the position — and he doesn’t mean that in a good way. Grisham, Hasan stresses, will fit right in with the Trump Administration because she is a “demonstrable liar.”
The U.K.-born Hasan is known for not pulling punches, but he is also known for offering plenty of evidence to back up his assertions. And he explains, in detail, why he considers Grisham untrustworthy.
Hasan recalls Grisham’s statements when Melania Trump visited migrant children who were in detention in McAllen, Texas in June 2018 and boarded the plane wearing a jacket that said, “I really don’t care. Do U?”
Grisham, Hasan recalls, insisted, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.” But in October 2018, the first lady acknowledged that the jacket “was kind of a message, yes” — and that message was meant “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. And I want to show them that I don’t care.”
Hasan emphasizes that “what matters is that Grisham was willing to so brazenly lie about such a trivial issue — and has never acknowledged it or apologized.”
Hasan also recalls that in July 2018, President Trump “falsely claimed that he had arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum, and had predicted the outcome of the vote.” That was a false statement, Hasan notes, because “the president had arrived in the country the day after the referendum, on June 24” — and Grisham went along with the lie by insisting to a BBC reporter that Donald Trump arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016 rather than June 24, 2016.
Grisham tweeted, “I was there. June 23.”
Grisham’s history of blatant dishonesty, Hasan writes, makes her “the perfect appointment to an administration of pathological liars.” And he includes Sanders in that generalization, asserting that during her two years as White House press secretary, the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has told “lie after lie after lie.”
“There don’t seem to be any consequences for Trump advisers who tell lies or break the law,” Hasan writes, stressing that dishonesty is considered a virtue — not a liability — in the Trump Administration. And considering that dishonesty is encouraged rather than discouraged in the Trump Administration, Hasan writes, Grisham will be the ideal successor to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
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