“I saw [Donald Trump] when the cameras were off,” former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told a raucous crowd at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Behind closed doors,” Grisham revealed, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement-dwellers.”
And with that statement Grisham, the Republican former “true believer” in Trump, gave Democratic operatives in the Harris-Walz camp their marching orders.
Because if Trump really has denigrated and mocked his MAGA loyalists as Grisham asserts — and “basement-dwellers” is a close match with Hillary Clinton‘s oft-quoted “deplorables” trigger — then someone somewhere presumably has video of Trump mocking them, no matter how “closed” the doors were.
[Grisham added: “He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth…He used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough and people will believe you.’”]
Trump’s MAGA movement derives much of its fuel — and its donations — from a demographic powered by aggrieved white Americans without college educations who, by their own accounts, feel they are seen as inferior by a technocratic “elite” class.
That offending elite class is what Trump effectively rails against to his political advantage, while also belonging to the group.
If Trump were exposed, as Grisham teases is possible, for using that aggrieved demographic — his unwavering MAGA base — for pure political gain while only feigning his respect for them, that exposure could strike a devastating blow against the billionaire’s “populism.”
Grisham didn’t just speak at the DNC, she engaged the opposition afterwards on X, replying incisively to an ad hominem attack by MAGA roustabout Laura Loomer with pledges to keep telling “the truth” about Trump.
Hi @LauraLoomer – I’ve actually hit menopause, which sucks a ton & yes it’s a weight struggle. Def not rich either – I run a non-profit animal sanctuary & could barely afford the blazer I wore tonight. BUT…I told the truth & plan to keep doing so. #RepublicansForHarris https://t.co/PL5bMMhnV3
— Stephanie Grisham (@OMGrisham) August 21, 2024
Yet even if such video exists — of Trump saying the things Grisham recounts him saying — there is no guarantee Trump’s base will believe it, or hold him responsible.
A video of Trump mocking his own followers might be sloughed off as “Trump being Trump” — a catchall excuse for people who don’t want to abandon the cause, such as it is, and the comradery that MAGA has provided for those who portray themselves as marginalized by a changing country.
After all, Trump ducked the furor over the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also once professed “I love the poorly educated” — a statement the “poorly educated” either thought wasn’t about them or read as a sincere “love,” while the politically-minded saw it as an admission of Trump’s affection for easy marks to manipulate.
Trump has also paid little price for his alleged denigration of military service members even as another former Trump insider, former Chief of Staff and 4-Star General John Kelly, reported that Trump called dead soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”
Kelly wrote that Trump “rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”