- Trump liked
Ginni Thomas 'White House visits because he "loved to gossip,"Stephanie Grisham said. - "He loved hearing about who was a Never Trumper, or allegedly one," Grisham told The Daily Beast.
President
Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a mainstay in conservative and tea-party circles, is under scrutiny for exchanging texts in late 2020 and early 2021 with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time, about overturning the 2020 election.
For years before that, Ginni Thomas was known for coming to the White House to dish about Trumpworld people who might be disloyal or part of the "deep state" and should be fired, The Beast reported. She also leveraged her ability to capture Trump's attention with lists of supposedly loyal people whom she thought Trump should hire instead, The Beast added.
"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," which Ginni would do, Grisham, a former chief of staff to first lady Melania Trump and former top spokesperson 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, 2021, 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, The Beast reported.
"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" and targeted even 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, The Beast reported.
Those lists, The Beast said, were often filled with "infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas."
The "lists were so insane and unworkable," another former Trump White House official who was tasked with fielding and reviewing Thomas' lists told The Beast, adding: "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 roles included the conservative media personality Dan Bongino, the pro-Trump Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, and the conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, The Beast reported. Gaffney was also at an infamous and chaotic January 2019 White House meeting with conservative activists organized by Thomas, The New York Times Magazine reported.
Now, the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, 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 Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the Capitol riot or even resign or be impeached.