At one point, I asked him, “Why are you advancing this birther foolishness?”
He said, “It’s just politics. This is politics.” He claimed it was part of his opposition research, which everyone did. Since he was contemplating a serious run for the presidency in 2012—just like he’d said in 2004 and 2008—he considered it all fair game, just what you had to do to compete.
I remembered this conversation five years later when the news broke about Don Jr.’s meeting with that Russian lawyer in Trump Tower after he’d been promised in an email, “Official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” Was that just more opposition research, too? Just another example of what you had to do to compete?
• • •
AT THE 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner at the Washington, DC, Hilton, Obama came out and immediately started roasting Trump about the birther business. Both Donald and I were in attendance. I was sitting probably seven or eight tables away from Donald at the dinner. Obama made jokes about Donald Trump’s “credentials and breadth of experience.” Obama continued, “In an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately you did not blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf, you fired Gary Busey, and these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”
I saw the expression on Donald Trump’s face.
He was livid.
Obama’s delivery, the words, the power, were not just funny, they were impactful. His joke about The Apprentice made people at my table glance my way while laughing. Barack said from the podium: “Well handled, sir. Well handled,” and addressed the crowd, “Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House. Let’s see what we’ve got up there.” Then, on the screen behind him, an image appeared of the White House with a Trump sign branded upon it, like Trump Tower.
It was in that moment, in that room, that Donald Trump made the decision, not only that he would run for president in 2016, but also that he would take his revenge on Obama’s humiliating him in front of all those influential people. I was there to witness it. Not a lot of people can make that connection, but I know what I saw. When Seth Meyers took the mic and called the very idea of a Trump presidency “a joke,” I could almost hear Trump’s thoughts from a few tables away: Laugh now, but soon enough, the joke is going to be on all of you.
If Trump could, against every odd there was, become president, the only item on his to-do list would be to erase the legacy of Barack Obama by undoing his policies. And it sounds shallow, it sounds stupid, it sounds harmful, but that’s just the reality from my perspective, and I had a very unique view as this unfolded.
Six months later, in October 2011, my brother Jack was murdered. He was home sleeping in his bed in Youngstown when his girlfriend’s ex broke in to the house and shot and killed him in cold blood.
My brother had his share of problems growing up, but he’d turned his life around, found a vocation, and was making us all proud. This tragedy devastated our family, as you can imagine. First, my father killed, and now my brother. The funeral was agony. I spoke at the service and honored his life.
We didn’t know that the National Enquirer had sent a reporter, a black woman who pretended to be a mourner, to cover it. She took the words from my eulogy, turned them into an article with quotes, and claimed to have interviewed me while we stood over my brother’s casket. The paper called it “an exclusive interview.”
I hired the best lawyers and, within a month, put the tabloid on notice that I was preparing to sue, because I was so upset that my grief had been exploited with falsehoods. Their calling it an “exclusive interview” made my case unbeatable. It’s unethical to use that language unless the subject agrees to be interviewed.
Then Donald Trump called me. We hadn’t spoken since the White House Correspondents’ dinner. We caught up briefly, and he said, “Omarosa, you’ve got to drop this lawsuit against the Enquirer. David Pecker is my close friend. I’ve spoken with him, and he’s willing to work with you. What do you want?”
It came out that Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer, had called Donald Trump and said, “Isn’t Omarosa one of your mentees? Can you tell her to drop this lawsuit?”
As a personal favor to Pecker, Donald agreed to call me and talk me out of the lawsuit, but I was so angry they’d portrayed me as someone who’d seek publicity over my dead brother’s body that I was reluctant to drop it.
Donald went back to Pecker and negotiated a deal for me. In exchange for a settlement with American Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, they would give me the high-profile job and title of West Coast Editor.
This was the first time that, in exchange for dropping a lawsuit, Donald Trump brokered a senior position for me instead. The similarities between that deal and the one I was offered after my White House departure—in that case, my silence in exchange for a job—cannot be denied. The pattern had been established six years prior. No wonder they thought I’d bite the apple a second time.
I was still considering Donald’s deal when David Pecker called to apologize to me personally. He said, “It was that dumb reporter’s fault. She did this on her own. We’re so sorry. You’re great. We would love for you to join the team. It’s about reality TV, and you’re the queen of reality.”
He said all the right things. The job included travel, an office, a staff of photographers and reporters. But what sealed the deal for me was that Donald personally asked me to accept it. He’d been very influential in my life, and I was loyal to him and ever grateful for what he’d done for me. If he asked me, as a favor, to drop my lawsuit against another of his friends, I had to do it.
The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. It was a great opportunity, plain and simple. AMI, the parent company of Us Weekly, OK!, and Star magazines, published the celebrity magazines. I had a degree in journalism that I hadn’t yet put to good use. And I would get to see the inner workings of the machine. My logic was, If you can’t beat them, join them.
I worked there for two years and got to learn the magazine business from the inside. I got to see all their dirty tricks. Of course, in hindsight, we all know the seedier side to the friendship between David Pecker and Donald Trump. There are two instances that we know of the National Enquirer’s buying exclusive rights to stories about Donald—Karen McDougal and a doorman at Trump Tower who claimed to have proof that Trump had a love child with his former housekeeper. The tabloid then suppressed the stories by never publishing them, a practice called “catch and kill.” In June 2018, David Pecker was subpoenaed by federal prosecutors for their records about the Karen McDougal payoff as part of their investigation into Michael Cohen. It’s suspected that Cohen brokered that deal for Trump, too.
Now, when I look at things, I’m stunned that I was involved in this kind of shady dealing. But I’d been in the Trump cult for nearly a decade, and by then I was all in. This kind of backroom dealmaking had made Donald a huge success.
My relationship with Michael Clarke Duncan was strong and life seemed to be moving in the right direction.
• • •
ON FEBRUARY 18, 2012, I was officially ordained as a Baptist minister. I had to go in front of an ordination council for an examination, and I passed with flying colors. It was the greatest moment thus far in my ministry. Also that month, Trump announced he would not run as an Independent if Mitt Romney became the Republican nominee. Even after he dropped out of the race, and after President Barack Obama finally released his “long form” birth certificate in April, Trump would not stop sowing seeds of doubt about it. In May, he said on CNN, “A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.”
In hindsight, I think that Trump was experimenting and testing th
e gullibility of the voting public. If he kept saying and tweeting that the birth certificate was “a fraud,” as he would continue to do for years to come, would people believe him? Would repetition of a lie turn it into the truth? If he said what a certain segment of the population wanted to hear, would they run toward him, as if summoned by a dog whistle?
His birther movement was, in effect, the earliest stages of a political campaign that began in November 2007 and did not end until November 2016.
While Donald was appearing on cable news shows questioning the legitimacy of the first black president, I was out of the country, in Scotland with Michael for his spot on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. We took the opportunity to tour the Highlands. Michael and I visited a glorious Scottish castle, and he surprised me by proposing. I accepted. Upon our return to LA, I immediately started planning our wedding. What many people—even those in my family—didn’t know was that I was two months pregnant at the time.
In July, two months after our engagement, I fell ill. For two days, I was in severe pain. I was rushed to the hospital and learned that I’d miscarried and that I needed immediate surgery to remove a large fibroid in my uterus. I had the surgery and returned home to recover. Because of the placement of the fibroid, laparoscopic surgery was not an option, and the incision wound extended from hip to hip. I walked around doubled over, in a great deal of pain, unable to lift anything heavier than a pound or two.
I was lying in bed with Michael the night of July 13, several days post-op, still in pain, still grieving for the lost pregnancy, when I noticed a change in his breathing. His soft snores became ragged, and then stopped altogether. I put my hand on his chest and realized he wasn’t breathing. I called 911 in a panic and told the operator what was happening, that my fiancé wasn’t breathing and might be having a heart attack. The operator gave me instructions to perform CPR, which I did, as I’d been trained to do in college, until the paramedics arrived and took Michael to the hospital.
He was still alive—the paramedics told me if it hadn’t been for my efforts, he would have died—but the ER doctors told me he needed to be rushed to the more sophisticated cardiac trauma unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, six miles away. I hired a private ambulance to take him there, riding with Michael in the back, my abdomen pain completely forgotten.
He lingered in the hospital for days, then weeks, regaining consciousness here and there, but never fully aware of where he was or what had happened. I sat at his side praying every day and couldn’t help remembering sitting by my father’s bedside when he held on for two weeks and then left this world.
I focused on what needed to be done in the now. What did the doctors say? Which friends were visiting? What paperwork needed to be executed? I didn’t allow myself to even think about anything other than his making a complete recovery. My emotions stayed locked up, a coping mechanism I’d learned throughout my childhood. But my supreme control was undone every time I came and went from our house.
Michael died on September 3, 2012. At the funeral a week later, I walked behind his casket, shattered, crying, and broken, completely consumed by grief with an emotional intensity I had never experienced before. His memorial service was beautiful and unbearably sad for me. His family and friends, including Tom Hanks and Jay Leno, gave touching eulogies. I received a letter from Trump after the memorial service. In his note, he wrote, “I’m sorry about your loss. I heard Michael was a good guy.”
After the memorial, I went home to find his fans had created a shrine outside our gate, lighting candles and leaving flowers. It was so large, it was hard to get through. I sat down on our couch, still in shock that his life and our future were gone, along with our baby, and my brother, and my father. I’d experienced so much loss in my life. If it weren’t for my faith and my family, I don’t know how I could have gotten through that time. Michael and I had two dogs, a shar-pei and a rottweiler, as well as a couple of cats and fish. We were the parents of our happy menagerie, and the dogs and cats just stared at me crying on the couch, not knowing what was going on, but obviously feeling the loss. It filled every inch of our home and every being living inside it.
A month later, a dear friend of mine came to visit, and she said, “At some point you’re going to have to take the memorial down.” I agreed with her, but I couldn’t just throw it away. His fans loved him, and so did I. Removing their cards and candles would be agonizing for me. It all felt like too much to bear. I told myself, just get through today. I wound up taking the dogs to our weekend vacation spot on the beach for two days. When I got home, the shrine was completely gone. My friends took care of it for me, even scraping the wax off the cement. I will be forever grateful to them for that.
My family and friends helped, but living in such a massive house alone and sleeping in the bed where he’d had his heart attack was agonizing for me. Additionally, I had to deal with all of Michael’s long-lost family members and associates who came out of the woodwork making demands for money and inheritance. His lawyers and executor of his vast estate handled the claims one by one until they were resolved. Under the stress, I felt that my very existence was spinning. I was in a deep state of grief and dealing with depression and needed to turn things around before they spun out of control.
The election in November went by in a blur. Obama beat Romney, and Donald went on a classic Twitter rant about the “rigged election.” I’d supported Obama and was glad he won, but I was so deep in my grief that I barely noticed.
I’d taken a leave of absence from my magazine job and now regretted that decision. Work had always been all-consuming. I needed to work through the pain.
That fall, Donald called me personally and said, “How are you doing, Omarosa?”
“Not too well, Mr. Trump.” Every day, my depression darkened. It seemed bottomless.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Listen, I need your help with something. I’m doing another season of the show. I really need you to come back one more time.”
Again? I didn’t know if I could. “I’m flattered . . .”
“I can’t do it without you. I need you as an all-star.”
I was in no condition to do a TV show. But he persisted. “Look, it will be good for you to get out of the house, and you can raise money for charity. What was Michael’s charity? You can do it for him, as a way to honor him.”
One part of me knew that Donald only did things that served his own agenda. He wanted me on his show, and he would exploit my grief to do it. On the other hand, he was right about my needing to get out of the house and think about anything besides fighting to stay out of the ever-widening, ever-deepening hole of grief.
“It would be great to do something for Michael’s charity,” I said. It was the Sue Duncan Children’s Center. Ms. Duncan (no relation) was the mother of Michael’s childhood friend Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and ran a center for children from the South Side of Chicago. He bequeathed a large sum to the center in his will, and I could add to that amount on the show. Just the thought of that lightened my grief.
“Great! I’ll have the producers call you.”
He was self-serving, yes. But his being self-serving, this time, helped me.
• • •
IN CLASSIC CONFLICT-BAITING style, the candidates were separated into two teams, one predominantly white (Trace Adkins, Gary Busey, Dee Snider, Penn Jillette, Marilu Henner, Lisa Rinna, Stephen Baldwin) and the other team, predominantly black and liberal (myself, Lil Jon, La Toya Jackson, Dennis Rodman, and others). There was a joke made about our being the black team and that the other team was like the Republican National Convention.
The racial tension in our nation was being played up for ratings on the show. Mark Burnett was the mastermind of creating conflict. Burnett had been in the British military, where he’d learned tactics like creating conflict to divide the enemy and conquer them. I’d been involved in the franchise from the very beginning, and I saw how he divided teams by gender, by class, by race. He h
oned this type of conflict-baiting on the social experiment of Survivor, and he naturally brought those tactics to The Apprentice.
Gary Busey was annoying but entertaining. He had terrible body odor and horrible breath, and no concept of personal space. In his original season on the show, he’d established a crazy-person persona that had been marketable, packaged, and presented to the audience, who ate it up. Judging by his antics, he’d decided to double down on his persona this time around.
La Toya Jackson’s energy was very dark. Anytime someone mentioned my Michael’s death, she brought up her brother’s death in 2009, and how her brother’s ghost visited her at night.
Dennis Rodman had issues with sobriety. His apartment in Trump International was just a couple of doors down from me, so I could literally look out my peephole and see him getting off the elevator with what looked like transients, dealers, and hookers. Throughout the taping, he seemed inebriated at least half the time.
I noticed a contradiction in Donald Trump’s patience and tolerance of Rodman, the future ad hoc diplomat to North Korea, and his addiction. Trump didn’t have the same compassion for Khloé Kardashian. He fired her on season eight in 2009 because she’d been arrested for a DUI in the past.I The DUI hadn’t happened during the course of taping, but years before. Dennis Rodman’s drinking was forgiven, but Khloé was taken to task on national television about her arrest and fired. I believe sexism played a part, but I also think Donald was a little jealous of the Kardashians’ fame. Their reality TV franchise was on a meteoric rise, while The Apprentice was barely hanging on.
It’s easy to see his pettiness now so clearly. I see the little man behind the curtain. But for all those years, I forgave him his insecurities. It made me feel a sense of compassion for him, which only increased the ferocity of my loyalty.
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 7
