We truly underestimated Stephanie Grisham.

But it’s completely understandable. This is the press secretary who refused to hold a press conference on camera. (Turns out it is because she refused to stand up and tell lies in front of reporters). And when we read of her book “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” we believed it would be stuffed with more entertaining anecdotes but nothing really “new.”

We were wrong. Grisham offered a far more in-depth look inside the White House than we’d seen in other tell-alls, especially with respect to the early COVID days. She also dissected the dysfunctionality better than other biographies from former staffers.

In her latest interview in People magazine, she describes an environment in the White House, where Trump’s explosive temper made it such that grown adults would literally hide from Trump and – secretly – hope that his anger would find a new target soon enough, allowing the person to start over:

I never saw him lose his temper with Mrs. Trump. Then when I got to the West Wing, I saw him do it to others and it was really jarring. I remember being struck by how people just took it — a national security adviser or a secretary of state or a cabinet member … I never saw anyone push back.

The first time he did it to me was on Air Force One and it was so fast. Picture a DJ board where you can just push the volume all the way up. It’s that swift, how loud he gets.

The formula me and my colleagues took was: we would take it, and then just stay out of his line of sight for the next day or two. And then sadly, we would kind of hope he would turn his eye on someone else. I think that that’s where some of the real backstabbing, dog-eat-dog culture came from. You were so desperate not to be on his bad side, that you would let anybody else be on his bad side.

In every White House, there are competent people, look at Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Vindman as examples, but in such an environment, dog eat dog, where they hope he gets mad at someone else type of thing? It is doomed to fail and one doesn’t need a business degree in management to know it and see it coming from the beginning.

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[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak