Was Ivanka Trump Really Behind This Infamous Donald Trump Speech?

Former President Donald Trump's time in the Oval Office spawned a series of memoirs and tell-alls written by the Trump-adjacent — from White House staff to distant relatives. Perhaps most famously, there's Trump's niece, Mary Trump, who wrote "Too Much is Never Enough" followed by "The Reckoning." Sean Spicer, Trump's former White House press secretary had perhaps one of the most prolific careers following his decision to quit. He wrote "The Briefing," followed by "Leading America" and his 2021 book, with a title that doesn't hold anything back, "Radical Nation: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's Dangerous Plan for America," according to Powell's.

It might come as no surprise, then, that Stephanie Grisham has written a tell-all about her time in the White House. She was initially the deputy press secretary to Spicer then worked as an assistant to Melania Trump in the East Wing and finally was named White House press secretary after Sarah Huckabee Sanders, according to The Washington Post Magazine.

In her memoir, "I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House," Grisham opens up about many behind-the-scenes details, but specifically, the speech given by Trump in March 2020, where he created more mayhem than good concerning the coronavirus pandemic. Here's what she said.

Stephanie Grisham opens up about Donald Trump's infamous COVID-19 speech in "I'll Take Your Questions Now." Grisham claims that the speech was ushered forward not by Donald himself, but by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. In an exclusive preview of the book, provided to Vanity Fair, Grisham writes that, on March 11, 2020, members of the Coronavirus Task Force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and CDC director Robert Redfield, spoke with Trump in the Oval Office. Added to this group were Ivanka and Kushner.

"In the middle of all the discussion, Ivanka kept chiming in, 'But I think there should probably be an address to the nation tonight,'" Grisham wrote. Ivanka pressed this while the others felt they were not prepared for a speech. "At one point I called Ivanka out on her plan with what seemed an obvious question. 'What is it we'd be saying?' Grisham asked. "Because if she had a message she wanted her father to deliver, it was still a mystery to me."

Ivanka wanted her father to be on TV and she got Kushner to write the speech. The turnaround was so rapid, Grisham noted, that the team didn't have a chance for fact-checking or vetting the message. Grisham explained that Trump's speech was full of misinformation and led to huge repercussions for the White House team. "[A] line of reporters formed outside my office. Of course, it was our problem, not Jared's or Ivanka's..." Grisham said that Trump and his relatives took no responsibility for the problems that arose in the speech's aftermath.