Screenshot/ABC News
- Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump cut the line at the White House Easter Egg Roll, per Stephanie Grisham.
- Grisham wrote that they cut other kids in line to get pictures with Trump and the first lady.
- It was an "obnoxious and entitled display," Grisham wrote.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and their families cut other kids in line at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll so they could be photographed with President Donald Trump, according to a forthcoming book by former press secretary Stephanie Grisham.
In "I'll Take Your Questions Now," Grisham writes that Trump's eldest sons cut the line "ahead of the other children in attendance and made sure their own kids and not the kids of the general public were in the photos with the president and first lady."
"Some of the children and their parents had stood in long lines for an hour or longer to get a spot with the president, and they were relegated to the background," she continued. "I would go on to develop positive relationships with most of the Trump children, but that was a generally obnoxious and entitled display that did not appear to surprise" Melania Trump and other East Wing aides.
Grisham writes that the 2017 Easter Egg Roll was the first "big social event" at the Trump White House and that expectations ran high in Washington, DC, political circles.
"That was the 'mean girls' part of Washington, DC: pundits and society types were just waiting to see if Melania Trump and her skeleton crew could handle something like this, and it felt as though they were not-so-secretly hoping for a flop," Grisham writes.
But Grisham believed that the first lady, whom she served as chief of staff for until she became White House press secretary in July 2019, managed to pull it off.
Melania Trump "felt the pressure," but "if there was one thing she was good at, one thing she had experience in, it was making something look spectacular," the book says.
Among other things, Grisham writes that Melania Trump purposely kept the crowd size smaller than was the custom because she didn't want to keep parents and their kids waiting in long lines. She also paid close attention to the Easter bunny's wardrobe and apparently wasn't pleased with it.
"I don't like what he is wearing," the first lady said of the bunny, who initially wore a plaid vest, Grisham writes. Melania "felt it was tacky and distracting," so "then and there, only minutes before he was to hop out onto the White House lawn, Melania Trump made the Easter bunny strip."
Both Trumps have condemned Grisham and her memoir, which includes a slew of stories that paint a dishonest and incompetent White House. Grisham resigned her post after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
"Stephanie didn't have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning," Trump told The New York Times in a statement last week. Melania Trump, who counted Grisham as one of her few close aides for years, called Grisham a "deceitful and troubled individual."