Trump? It was like a clown car on fire driving into a fireworks factory, writes ...

As guests sat down to a state banquet in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace in June 2019, President Trump, in white tie and sitting next to the Queen, praised the ‘eternal friendship’ between the U.S. and the UK.

It seemed, for once, that decorum reigned over the most chaotic presidency in American history.

And yet behind the scenes in the run-up to the dinner, things were far from regal, according to the president’s then press secretary, Stephanie Grisham.

In a new book that has managed to humiliate an administration that seemed beyond embarrassment, she says all four of Trump’s adult children expected to be invited to the state banquet, along with their spouses and partners.

They believed they should also attend a dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence attended by Prince Charles.

‘Everyone began manoeuvring almost immediately,’ she recalls. Trump aides feared that some of this bunch were really not fit to be presented to the Queen.

‘We are going to look like the Beverly Hillbillies,’ wailed senior White House official Lindsay Reynolds. ‘We’ll be an embarrassment to the whole country.’

Even before the family left America, there was trouble. When Trump’s sons Donald Jr and Eric complained after Miss Reynolds prevented them from flying to the UK on Air Force One, the president exploded and told her never to ‘**** with his kids again’.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ambitious daughter Ivanka and her Machiavellian husband Jared Kushner were battling to join the President and First Lady when the Queen greeted them at the palace.

Mrs Trump, a stickler for protocol and no fan of Ivanka, was having none of it. ‘It didn’t dawn on me at first but, over the course of the next few days, I finally figured out what was going on,’ says Grisham. ‘Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States, on the same level as William and Kate in the United Kingdom. We didn’t call her “the Princess” for nothing, after all.’

In the event, there was no room for the pushy pair in the helicopter to the palace.

It’s just one of many colourful episodes from his presidency that Grisham details in her tell-all book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now.

She certainly has a lot to tell, having survived the full four-year term in the Trump White House, an administration she describes as ‘a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks’.

Mr Trump has dismissed the book as ‘another pitiful attempt to cash in on the president’s strength and sell lies about the Trump family’ and described its author as a ‘disgruntled former employee’ who has written a ‘book full of falsehoods’.

Mrs Trump accused Grisham of seeking ‘relevance and money’ through ‘mistruth and betrayal’, and described her as ‘a deceitful and troubled individual who doesn’t deserve anyone’s trust.’

But Grisham was, at various times, Trump’s press secretary and Mrs Trump’s spokesman, confidante and chief of staff.

Observers say she had a ringside seat and won’t have had to rely on hearsay. This isn’t the first expose from a Trump insider but it may be the most damning. Grisham says she witnessed everything from Trump’s lascivious interest in a press office aide to his ‘bonkers’ behaviour with world leaders, crawling to Vladimir Putin and once devoting much of a working breakfast with Boris Johnson to discussing the strength of kangaroos. Terrified that Trump may run again for the presidency in 2024, Grisham says she has decided to ‘break her silence’.

The 45-year-old mother of two, described this week by a rival as ‘a female Machiavelli with a penchant for Justin Bieber’, says she first met Trump at the 2016 Iowa State Fair.

Working as one of his campaign press officers, she emerged from a lavatory to find the future president waiting to go in. He asked her to keep mum about his using the ladies’ lavatory. ‘It can be our secret,’ he said. She would soon be privy to many more. Grisham feels that working for him was a ‘classic abuse relationship’ as he ‘was the distant, erratic father we all wanted to please’.

He could be incredibly charming and generous but his ‘temper was terrifying’ and could be directed at anyone.

She reveals that when the president was in a furious mood, his aides would quickly send for a colleague who Trump dubbed ‘the Music Man’.

His job was to calm him down by putting on the president’s favourite songs such as Memory from Cats and the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. ‘It was sort of like soothing the savage beast,’ says Grisham.

Trump was ‘obsessed’ with James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, but she adds: ‘I talked him out of including the song in his rallies because it wouldn’t have been a good look for him.’ Given the numerous accusations of sexual misconduct and philandering he faced, which he has denied, it certainly wouldn’t.

Grisham adds one more entry to the charge sheet, claiming Trump took an ‘unusual interest in a young, highly attractive’ female member of her press team who he tried to flatter by saying she should be on TV. On Air Force One flights, Trump would often ask for her to be brought to his office cabin, once allegedly saying: ‘Let’s bring her up and look at her ass.’

Grisham says she made sure she came along so they were never alone together.

She believes Putin exploited the president’s weakness for a pretty face, recounting a meeting between the two at the 2019 Osaka G20 summit, at which Fiona Hill, Trump’s British-born Russia expert, ‘leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure’.

Miss Hill, she says, ‘proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president’.