860 minutes with…Stephanie Grisham

In Kansas with Donald Trump’s former press secretary, who does not believe she will be redeemed.

- By Olivia Nuzzi

Stephanie Grisham saw the pickup outside and yelped, “That’s Larry!” She grabbed a package and raced out her door, down the steps of the porch, and through the gate of the white picket fence and leaned halfway into the truck’s passenger window. “I wanted you to have this,” she said.

Larry unwrapped the package to reveal a shimmering whiskey glass embossed in gold with the presidential seal. Grisham told him it had been engraved with the signature of the 45th president of the United States. “It’s one of the last ones,” she said. Larry’s eyes widened beneath the brim of his trump-embroidered baseball cap. “Wow,” he said. “Thank you.” Larry—“the meat guy”—is a local rancher who always comes bearing gifts. It was the first

Friday of October in Plainville, Kansas, and he’d stopped by with a printout of an article he thought Grisham might like about the importance of honoring the troops by standing for the national anthem. Grisham smiled and scanned the paper. “Thank you!” she said.

As he drove off, unease crept in. Grisham’s expression turned stricken. Larry did not yet know what she was about to do or what she had already done. He did not know he was speaking, in effect, to a Stephanie Grisham who no longer exists. “I feel like one of the most hated people in the country,” she told me. “The right hates me. They