Who is Stephanie Grisham, the loyal Trump aide who quit the White House?

At the 11th hour, the Trump administration seems to be crumbling. After a day of violence in Washington DC which saw the outgoing president’s supporters storm the US Capitol building in an attempt to stop Joe Biden’s confirmation, leaving four people dead, Mr Trump’s remaining allies are abandoning ship.

White House deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger resigned on Wednesday afternoon, CNN reports, joining a number of officials who are leaving the administration in the wake of the rioting and in response to the president’s reaction. Pottinger’s boss, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, was also considering quitting, sources told Reuters. White House social secretary, Rickie Niceta, has resigned, as has deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews, two sources told Reuters. And on Thursday morning, there were even reports that deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell might resign.

Meanwhile in the First Lady’s office, two top aides to Melania Trump are gone, including longtime, loyal Trump official Stephanie Grisham, who quit as the first lady’s chief of staff.

With 99 per cent of the Trump presidency over, and given she has weathered many a storm in the five years she has spent working for him, it’s perhaps an odd time for Grisham to resign. She was one of few long-lasting aides in an administration known for its extremely high turnover.

A twice-divorced mother-of-two, the 43-year-old joined the presidential campaign in 2015 as a press liaison. Before that, she had served as a spokeswoman in Arizona Republican politics, and before that an ad agency and the car company AAA.

After the presidential campaign, Grisham worked as Sean Spicer’s deputy before becoming the First Lady’s communications director. In this role, she quickly became Melania’s most prominent staffer. The pair are said to have been thick as thieves, with CNN describing Grisham as acting as “defender, enforcer and, often, protector”.

She later took up the role as White House press secretary, taking over from Sarah Sanders in July 2019. By this point, the number of the president’s original staff still working in the White House was dwindling. Even then, Grisham was one of the few loyal aides left.

In her nine month tenure as press secretary (it lasted until she was relocated to the first lady’s office on April 7) Grisham didn’t hold a single on-camera briefing, which for decades had been standard procedure. Unlike her predecessors, Spicer and Sarah Sanders, she was known for being largely invisible. She rarely hosted smaller briefings and hardly ever appeared on television. At one point during her tenure, writers Don Winslow and Stephen King said they would donate $200,000 to a children’s hospital if she did a briefing, and the Washington Post began a “Grisham Watch” to track her movements.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she became even less visible. Meanwhile the president began delivering his own daily Covid briefings. By mid-March she was in quarantine, fearing she had caught the virus at Mar-a-Lago. By April, she had departed the West Wing altogether. CNN reported she had clashed with Trump's newly appointed chief of staff Mark Meadows. She was replaced with Kayleigh McEnany, and sent back to the First Lady’s office, where she was made Chief of Staff.

Now, just as the administration is about to leave the White House for good, Grisham has handed in her resignation. "It has been an honor to serve the country in the White House,” she said in a statement on Wednesday. “I am very proud to have been a part of Mrs. Trump's mission to help children everywhere, and proud of the many accomplishments of this Administration.”

Grisham was the first aide to publicly announce her decision to leave, though she was soon followed by deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews and others. "As someone who worked in the halls of Congress I was deeply disturbed by what I saw today. I'll be stepping down from my role, effective immediately. Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power," Matthews said in a statement.

It would be safe to imagine they may not be the last.