Former White House aide Stephanie Grisham said Tuesday that former President Trump will have a hard time getting his message across, saying it’s “uncharacteristic” to stick to small venues and topical conversations.
“Maybe for a week he’ll try to stay true to his message,” Grisham said. He said in an interview Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, she said, “It depends on how strict the staff is with him, but he’s going to get bored. He’s going to get a little bit of a … [events]He has never done so before, and sooner or later he will demand a large rally.”
“It’s crazy, because everything I’ve heard is everyone telling him to present his best self. They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she continued. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist who loves attention and is not happy being quiet or on message.”
The former White House press secretary, who has become a vocal critic of her former boss, said staffers had a similarly difficult time getting Trump’s message across during the 2016 campaign.
“That’s not who he is, so they all know. We’ve done this a million times. We did it in 2016. We’ve done it my whole time in the White House,” Grisham said. “We were all trying to get them to stay on message. Everybody was constantly unhappy. We put tons of staff on it. You all know that. And this, you know, is now version 27.”
Republican leaders have also struggled to keep Trump on track, and with Harris gaining momentum, there have been growing calls from within the party to make Trump’s message the centerpiece of the campaign. Instead of bashing his political opponents, many Republicans have pressed Trump to focus more on the policy differences between the two parties.
“It’s not that he’s not talking about the economy, it’s not that he’s not talking about the border, he’s talking about other crazy things that are distracting us,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to former Speakers Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and John Boehner (R-Ohio), said on MSNBC earlier this week.
