Much has been made of former President Donald Trump’s attempted “bromances” with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. But he may have the most in common with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
According to former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Johnson was “one of the few European leaders Trump seemed to tolerate,” though she says that “conversations between those two, both pudgy white guys with crazy hair, redefined the word random.”
Grisham, who dishes on the two world leaders’ small talk in her new tell-all, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House,” writes that Johnson once expounded over breakfast about how Australia is “the most deadly country” because of its spiders, snakes, crocodiles and kangaroos.
That led to a long discussion between Trump and Johnson about the strength kangaroos possess, according to a passage quoted in The Guardian.
Grisham also said there was an occasion where Johnson and Trump got on the subject of gallbladders as they were discussing another political figure who’d just had surgery.
“Can you put a new gallbladder in?” Johnson wondered, while chowing down on scrambled eggs and sausage, according to Grisham. “I don’t know what a gallbladder does.”
“It has something to do with alcohol,” Trump replied.
Grisham’s book reportedly contains any number of other colorful claims, touching on everything from a secretive hospital visit to the soothing power of show tunes to stuff that doesn’t really bear thinking about.
In response, the former president has accused Grisham of being “paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
Meanwhile, not everyone today is ready to embrace Grisham ― a White House press secretary who famously never held a press room briefing ― or look past her role as part of the Trump administration.
The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote Thursday that “her (profitable) candor now is inadequate atonement for her complicity then,” and that “what Grisham represents ... is how deep people will bury their consciences when it plumps up their egos, professional statures, bank accounts.”
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