Stephanie Grisham says Trump relished his meetings with Ginni Thomas because he 'loved to gossip — all the time'

Clarence Thomas, Virginia Thomas — Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021.
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Trump relished Ginni Thomas' White House visits because he "loved to gossip," Stephanie Grisham says.
"He loved hearing about who was a Never Trumper, or allegedly one," Grisham told the Daily Beast.
Thomas would drop by the White House with lists of people she thought should be hired or fired.

President Donald Trump relished visits from Ginni Thomas because he loved hearing who was a disloyal "Never Trump" and "loved to gossip," former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told the Daily Beast.

Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a mainstay of conservative and Tea Party circles, is currently under scrutiny for exchanging conspiratorial texts in late 2020 and early 2021 with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 election.

But for years before, Thomas was known for coming to the White House to dish about Trump world people who might be disloyal or part of the "Deep State" and should be fired. She also leveraged her ability to capture Trump's attention with lists of supposedly loyal people who she thought Trump should hire instead, the Beast reported.

"Trump loved talking to Ginni so much because he loved hearing about who was a Never Trumper, or allegedly one. He loved people who would flatter him, [as Ginni would do]," Grisham, a former chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump and former top spokeswoman for Trump, told the Beast.

"But also, his obsession with loyalty aside, he just loved to gossip — all the time. That's something else he got out of his series of meetings at the White House with Ginni Thomas," added Grisham, who quit the Trump administration on January 6 and has since broken with Trumpworld and written a searing tell-all memoir about her time in the White House.

Thomas expertly played to Trump's demand for loyalty and anxieties about the "Deep State" in her White House visits — and would exacerbate Trump's paranoia about supposedly untrustworthy officials, leaving White House officials to handle the fallout.

"We all knew that within minutes after Ginni left her meeting with the president, he would start yelling about firing people for being disloyal," a former senior-level Trump official told the Beast. "When Ginni Thomas showed up, you knew your day was wrecked."

But the lists that got Trump into a frenzy, the Beast said, "were particularly problematic, as they were frequently based on pure conjecture, rumor, or score-settling," targeting even loyal, die-hard pro-Trump officials.

And even after aides were able to talk Trump down from his demands for certain people on Thomas' lists to be immediately fired, they still had to deal with parsing through the names on the lists of people who Thomas suggested to be hired.

Those lists, the Beast said, were "often filled with "infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas."

"These fucking lists were so insane and unworkable," another former Trump White House official who was tasked with fielding and reviewing Thomas' lists told the Beast. "A lot of them were dripping with paranoia and read like they were written by a disturbed person."

Some of the names Thomas floated for White House posts included conservative media personality Dan Bongino, pro-Trump Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, and notorious conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, the Beast reported. Gaffney was also reportedly at an infamous and chaotic January 2019 White House meeting with conservative activists organized by Thomas.

Now, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is seeking to interview Thomas about the text messages with Meadows that the panel obtained.

And while none of Thomas' texts with Meadows explicitly mentioned her husband or the election-related cases before the Supreme Court, they've led to calls from some Democratic lawmakers for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from future January 6-related cases or even resign or be impeached.

Read the original article on Business Insider