Donald Trump’s former press secretary turned devout Trump critic Stephanie Grisham has once again spilled the tea on her former boss — this time all but letting the former president’s own base know just how stupid and gullible he really thinks they are.
In the midst of the January 6th anniversary of the violent, Trump-fueled attack on the US Capitol, Stephanie Grisham sat down for an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, in which they spoke about the events that took place at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and Donald Trump’s deep-seated claims and so-called beliefs that he was the true and rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite his clear and repeatedly confirmed loss to Joe Biden.
Trump has recently doubled back down on his notorious “Big Lie” claims to the public, as the 2024 presidential election closes in, but Grisham says that at the root of it all, there’s not a shadow of doubt in her mind that even Donald himself knows it’s all a big, fat lie — he just doesn’t care, because he knows his base of supporters will believe whatever he says.
Speaking with Acosta, Grisham explained, “He knows he’s lying. He used to tell me when I was press secretary, go out there and say it. It doesn’t matter, Stephanie. Say it over and over and over again. People will believe it. He knows his base believes in him. He knows he can basically say anything, and his base will believe what he’s saying.”
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The former Trump press secretary went on to say that, while his lies and gullible base will likely help him secure the 2024 primaries, she expects it to backfire in his face when it comes to the general election.
“I think this will help propel him into the general, but I think that independents and center-leaning Republicans are not going to be buying this,” Grisham explained. “They’re much, much smarter than that. I think he’s going to get in trouble with it in the general with these kinds of lies.”
This prompted the CNN host to ask Grisham about a recent poll that showed approximately one-third of people actually believe that the January 6th Capitol attack was caused by the FBI. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger told CNN that unhinged and baseless theories like this were heavily propped up by the likes of Fox News and Trump-loving members of Congress, but Grisham likened the whole thing to more of a cult — and she’s far from the first former Trump admin employee to express similar sentiment.
Grisham explained:
I think that when you believe in somebody so much, when you believe in somebody like Donald Trump, and I can speak to this because I actually did believe in him for a very long time, I think that when you put it all on the line and believe in somebody, I think it’s easier to just want to believe that the FBI, that law enforcement, that the people who go to help us when we’re in trouble would be behind something, rather than admitting that the person you’ve been backing for years and years is a fraud and actually doesn’t care about the American people or our country.”
The former Trump press secretary went on to note that she was speaking from a position of personal experience and even admitted that she personally struggled to come to terms with who Donald Trump truly is “because I really believed in him, his policies, and the person I thought he was.”
“I think that people just would rather believe these conspiracy theories rather than admit that they were wrong about this person,” Grisham said.
You can watch her CNN segment here:
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
