White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham OUT after nine months…and without ever giving press briefing
STEPHANIE Grisham has left her job as White House Press Secretary after never giving a briefing during her nine months in the post, The Sun has confirmed.
Grisham took over the role in July 2019, but will now return to the to serve as First Lady Melania Trump's .
Before that, she had served as a longtime spokesperson and confidante to the first lady.
The decision was made by the president's new chief of staff, former North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, , which first reported the news on Tuesday morning.
Kayleigh McEnany, a Trump campaign spokesperson, will fill Grisham's place, reported, adding she had been a "vocal defender" of Trump during television appearances.
Alyssa Farah, the current Defense Department spokesperson and former press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, will serve as the White House's director of strategic communications, and Ben Williamson, Meadow's former chief of staff to Meadows, will be the White House's senior adviser for communications.
Grisham was third press secretary, following Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, and the fourth woman to ever take on the role. She was Trump's seventh communications director.
Per CNN, Grisham stopped regularly attending senior staff meetings "and has not played a major role as the administration has dealt with the ."
She hasn't been seen at Trump's daily coronavirus briefings, during which the president speaks at a podium alongside federal health officials and members of the Coronavirus Task Force.
It's been reported that when Pence was appointed to lead that task force, his communications team took over responsibility for messaging.
During a recent discussion of how his administration has dealt with the coronavirus outbreak, Trump said his communications team has "done a poor job on press relationships, and I guess, I don't know who to blame for that."
"Maybe I can blame ourselves for that. I will blame ourselves. But I think we've done a great job. I think we've done a poor job in terms of press relationship."
When Grisham joined the West Wing last year, she said she planned to brief the press daily — after her predecessor, Sanders, stopped holding briefings herself.
But Grisham ultimately never gave a single press briefing.
In addition to serving as White House press secretary, Grisham served as the communications director and still kept her roles as Melania Trump's communications director.
When Trump brought her on, he told reporters of Grisham: “Stephanie has been with me from the beginning, as most of you know."
"And then over the last couple years she’s worked for the first lady, done a fantastic job. The first lady loves her, thinks she’s been, you know, just incredible. She’s very talented."
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“She actually gets along with the media,” the president said of Grisham at the time.
Grisham had been known among White House reporters who covered Trump's 2016 campaign, during which she functioned as a press aide or “wrangler” — the staffer who travels with the media and helps lead journalists where they needed to be for events.
Before joining , Grisham, an native, worked in in her home state as a spokeswoman and communications adviser for elected officials facing scandals.
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