While in the midst of shooting season thirteen, Inside Edition announced that they were going to release a recording of my 911 call on the night of Michael’s heart attack. Anyone who cared to click would hear the desperation in my voice to keep him alive, everything I did, everything the operator instructed me to do. Nothing could be more personal than what transpired on that tape. The idea of it being leaked felt like a physical violation. It was certainly an emotional one. And it would happen while I was shooting the show, all playing out on TV. I had to leave the competition for a couple of days to try to stop the release.
When I was fired on the fifth episode, I was relieved. I was able to win $40,000 for the Sue Duncan Children’s Center, which was the bright point. Another positive was during a boardroom session when Donald said to me, “Can I be honest? I almost consider you a friend.” When I responded that we brought this show to number one, he replied, “We did. Do I like Omarosa? I love Omarosa, okay?”
When the show aired in early 2013, I just knew the series had run its course. There was one more season with Trump, but then it was over. I looked back at my three seasons on The Apprentice as life-changing and, for the most part, positive. As for my friendship with Donald—a unique kind of work friendship, now ten years along—I felt a deep respect for him, too.
When people try to understand the dynamic between Donald and me, it begins with shared triumph. Donald likes winners. He likes people who make him money and get him attention and headlines. I did all that for him and for the show. The Apprentice storm that first season was so massive, so defining for both our careers, that we are forever connected because of it.
Donald and I had a symbiotic relationship, as I’ve said. I gave him ratings, and he gave me, a woman of color, opportunities, again and again, which, in turn, gave him someone to point to and say, “I’m not a racist misogynist! Look at all I’ve done for Omarosa!”
At no point during our mutually profitable, loyal connection did I stop to think, “Is he using me?” We’d both gained tremendously by being in each other’s lives, personally and professionally, for a long time.
I couldn’t imagine that ever changing.
* * *
I. There were reports in 2016 that claimed he’d actually fired her because of her weight. According to anonymous Apprentice staffer sources, he’d called her a “fat piglet” and bemoaned that they didn’t book “the hot one,” referring to Khloe’s sister Kim Kardashian.
Part Two
* * *
The Campaign
Chapter Five
* * *
The Woman Problem
In early 2013, the Democratic Party’s presumptive front-runner was Hillary Clinton. She’d waited for Obama’s two terms to wind down, and now it was her turn. The idea of Hillary shattering the glass ceiling to become the first woman president was almost as thrilling as Barack Obama’s becoming the first black president. Although I’d been disappointed by her handling of her husband’s infidelities in the nineties, I knew her to be a strong, smart woman of conviction, and an inspirational figure.
Then First Lady Hillary Clinton actually gave the commencement address when I graduated with my master’s degree from Howard in 1998, and parts of her speech had stayed with me all these years. The speech spoke to me more than ever in 2013, given the surprising turns my life had taken. “I think you can be a good citizen by defying conventional wisdom,” she’d said in that address. “And helping to track down the stereotypes that keep us locked in our little worlds. I’m sure that all of you have had moments when your expectations of who someone was—because of what they looked like, or where they were from—were shattered—because you took the time to sit down and talk, or grab a meal together, or share a book. You’ve had the opportunity to spend the last four years in one of the most diverse settings imaginable—yet I would bet it still takes courage to take that first step, and to put yourself beyond a place of comfort.”
I’d certainly bumped up against people’s expectations of who I was because of where I came from, my gender, the color of my skin, what I chose to do for a living, and have always known that those prejudices would shatter if someone sat down with me and just had a conversation. I’d been fighting the stigma of extreme poverty and coming from a single-parent household nearly every day for the last ten years. Now I was going to step outside my comfort zone again, by jumping back into politics, in support of a woman I deeply admired.
My fellow Howard grad Quentin James—political influencer, community organizer, and then NAACP board member—was heading up the African American finance committee for the Ready for Hillary PAC, and I was excited to work alongside him and his team. Our clear understanding was that the members of the African American finance team would become an arm of her official campaign when the time came, but until she announced her candidacy, she couldn’t have anything to do with her PAC. It is standard procedure for the candidate to keep a PAC at arm’s length, although it seemed obvious to everyone that Ready for Hillary would be the rudimentary structure upon which her official campaign would be built.
During this time I reached out to longtime Clinton adviser and political consultant Minyon Moore to see what the overall strategy was for her presidential campaign. She assured me the best vehicle to help HRC was the Ready for Hillary PAC. So I doubled down on my efforts to raise money and awareness for Hillary. As a celebrity, my networks were vast, and I drew big crowds to the events I organized for Ready for Hillary.
I was the special guest speaker at a fund-raiser organized by Quentin at a Los Angeles nightclub on November 7, 2013. Part of my speech was quoted in the Los Angeles Times the next day: “All of us have to stick together and get behind this sister because I’m going to tell you, when I was at the White House, she cared about each and every one of us and she made sure we stayed connected to the issues that were important.” I meant every word. I believed that Hillary truly cared about the African American community.
Minyon assured us that the powers that be were very pleased with our committee’s contributions. “You will have a role,” she said. It only made sense. We’d all worked together to create the infrastructure. It was logical that the people who had laid the foundation would build the house.
When Hillary announced her candidacy on April 12, 2015, the Ready for Hillary PAC closed down, and all the resources shifted to the official presidential Ready PAC. We were all excited to make that transition and join what would surely be a historic campaign. I remember feeling a sense of belonging to something meaningful.
But we didn’t hear from them.
We waited. And waited some more.
On May 29, Quentin forwarded an email to our committee saying he would not be joining the Hillary for America campaign as African American Outreach Director after all, and that someone else would be serving in the role instead.
I read this email in shock and called Quentin immediately. He was as angry and upset as I was. We felt duped and insulted. The woman they’d replaced him with had not been involved with Ready for Hillary, and I later heard that her appointment had been a quid pro quo deal to secure a key endorsement from that person’s mentor, a representative in a swing state, a.k.a. swamp politics.
I’d given Ready for Hillary two years of my life. So had Quentin. After this unceremonious rejection, my support for her was now tepid.
Moving forward, the Hillary campaign would rely heavily on data collection and analysis (Democrats do love their data), and not on face-to-face outreach and human connection. This approach would prove to be their downfall in the end.
• • •
THE ENTIRE TIME I’d known Donald Trump, he’d been talking about running for president. In 2003, he talked about 2004. In 2007, he talked about 2008. In 2011, he talked about 2012. There had been many efforts to recruit him to run, but none of those runs ever materialized. Each election cycle reporters would ask me if Donald Trump was ever going to run. I would respond with a Donald-like “Never say nev
er.”
On June 16, 2015, just two weeks after I’d been misled by the Clinton campaign, he proved many naysayers wrong. Trump and Melania descended that famous gold escalator in Trump Tower and he declared his candidacy for president.
I watched the announcement from my home in Los Angeles, and, when I heard his comments about Mexican immigrants—“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”—I thought, This is over before it’s even gotten started. A traditional political announcement does not include such provocative statements. But Trump wasn’t a traditional candidate, and he knew that bringing up this particular issue would appeal to a subset of the American population, the so-called forgotten man.
His comments were strategically controversial, and sure enough, he had the media riveted. Once again, he was topic A across the country. I remember receiving an avalanche of texts and calls from various people who all asked me the same question, “What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure.
I was bemused, like many Americans, by the spectacle of a Trump candidacy. Part of me thought he was dead in the water. Part of me knew never to bet against Donald Trump. I thought, We’ll have to wait and see.
Until the day he entered the race, I’d never heard anybody say, “Donald Trump is a racist.” He was a pop cultural superstar, referenced by dozens of rappers in their rhymes. He was close friends with P. Diddy, Russell Simmons, and Don King. Donald Trump does not discriminate in his workplace against people of color. I’d visited a dozen Trump properties and spent time in his organization, and his staffs are diverse at every level.
As I thought at the time, he is racial, though, in that he uses race and racial relations to manipulate people. I believed the birther movement stuff was opposition research, as he claimed, but it also had the purpose of riling up the Republican base of white voters. Trump’s racialization of illegal immigrants and his rhetoric about “building a wall” served the same goal. I believed then that Donald Trump was intentionally pitting races against each other for political gain, just as he’d pitted races against each other on The Apprentice for ratings.
In hindsight, I see the flaws in my thinking. And it probably should have bothered me more than it did. But, as I’ve mentioned, I had a blind spot where Trump was concerned. Because of my proximity to him, I couldn’t see him from a certain angle that everyone else did. When I met him, he was the famous billionaire, and I was a hopeful, aspiring businesswoman trying to impress him. The Apprentice experience changed my life from anonymous to famous, from weary to wealthy. As a girl who’d lived in extreme poverty, I equated wealth with security. As I’d come to learn, money does not protect you from pain. I associated the Trump way of life with security and freedom. When people accused him of intolerance, I simply couldn’t see it.
One of the earliest showcase events of the Republican primary season was the Fox News–hosted debate on August 6, 2015. I watched along with 24 million other viewers, the highest rated primary debate in history. I was not part of the campaign at this point; I was an outside observer with personal knowledge of Trump.
Ten candidates crowded the stage, but all eyes and most of the questions were directed at the most controversial candidate, Donald Trump.
Megyn Kelly, the debate moderator, asked him directly, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals—’ ”
He replied, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” The crowd cheered.
He was not happy with how she put him on the spot. The next day, he complained about Megyn Kelly’s treatment to CNN’s Don Lemon and said, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”
At the time, I believed that the “war on women” Kelly was describing was really only a war on Rosie O’Donnell, too. I didn’t believe he was at war with all women, rather, he had personality clashes with specific women, just as he’d had personality clashes with specific men. I see the holes in that thought process now. I can look back and see a pattern of sexist treatment and derogatory comments toward women going back to my first season on The Apprentice. But, again, I had that blind spot. I couldn’t see what I should have. I felt protective of this man who’d never said an inappropriate thing to me—or, to my knowledge, about me.
There had been rumblings about him in the past, though. In Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III, the author quoted from Ivana Trump’s sealed 1990 divorce deposition, accusing her ex-husband of a violent sexual assault, a violation that she referred to “as a rape.” In July 2015, Ivana Trump released a statement that said, “The story [of the violation] is totally without merit,” saying it was an overstatement made in the heat of a divorce battle. Allegations of sexual harassment emerged from women ranging from an up-and-coming model to a former receptionist. Jill Harth, a Florida woman who, with her boyfriend, was seeking a business partnership with Trump, detailed numerous incidents over a six-year period—Trump allegedly groped her between her legs and pinned her against a wall at Mar-a-Lago—in her 1997 sexual harassment suit. The couple had also filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit, which was settled on the condition that Harth withdraw the harassment suit. She did.
Like his alleged racism, his sexism could be explained away or somehow justified, if you were inclined to do so—as I was back then.
Trump’s woman problem of 2015 seemed reminiscent of what Bill Clinton had faced back in the late nineties and was mostly limited to spats with Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell. It would be another fourteen months before his woman problem of 2016, with the Access Hollywood tape and the accusations from more than a dozen women of sexual harassment. And, of course, his woman problem of 2017 would bring porn stars and Playmate payoffs.
Who knows what the rest of 2018 will bring?
I’d been through the Clinton White House, so I’d become desensitized to politicians being accused of behaving badly—with and without cause. In a political environment, it was all too common for a man to be accused of misbehavior.
Along with Katrina Campins, my Apprentice season one roommate and current Trump International Realty employee, I appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter on August 9 to talk about Trump’s bad attitude about women.
I said, “Donald Trump does not have a woman problem. I think this is equivalent to going through somebody’s trash and cherry-picking the things you think will bring down his campaign. Going through comments that Donald Trump has made in the last thirty years is just the lowest form of journalism. . . . Just because he doesn’t like Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t mean he hates all women. . . . He does not have a woman problem. . . . It’s so clear to me that Megyn Kelly has a bone to pick with Donald Trump. Everybody saw it. . . . I call it very, very personal. Donald Trump is really good about reading people’s intentions, and her intention was not to give him a fair chance of showing where he stands on women’s issues.”
My next media hit was on CNN on August 10, an interview with Don Lemon, who also asked me about Trump’s woman problem. I said, “We’ve squandered a whole weekend speculating whether or not he’s talking about hormones or not instead of trying to figure out about the gender wage gap, talking about reproductive health for women, talking about funding or defunding Planned Parenthood. Shame on the press, shame on the media, shame on people wasting women’s time. We need to know where the candidates are on these serious issues.”
Trump and his bare-bones campaign must have liked what they heard. A few days later, on August 15, I received a phone call from Michael Cohen, vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel. He was on the case to fix the woman problem.
Michael Cohen is a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy. He comes off profane and blunt, with bravado, and that�
��s exactly who he is. He’s also very funny and very street-smart. He’d have to be: he graduated from an average law school and managed to hustle up clients and a career.
From the bottom of the food chain, he rose to become the personal lawyer to the president of the United States. That took a lot of imagination, maneuvering, common sense, and creative problem solving—not to mention a flexible ethical code—that most people don’t have.
I liked Michael. He came into Trumpworld a few years after I did, and we sized each other up as straight shooters. He thought of me as a rebel, as someone who woudn’t be taken aback by his colorful use of language or intimidated by the threats that flowed from his lips toward anyone who put down or disrespected Trump. Because he liked me, he was courteous, comfortable, and friendly. Around anyone he didn’t trust—which was nearly all of humanity—he was aggressive, in-your-face, curt, and unapologetically brazen.
For his part, Trump was not always respectful to Michael, often mocking him and belittling him. Trump had sussed out that Michael would work ten times harder to earn praise if it were rarely given.
Michael began the call by telling me how ridiculous it was for anyone to accuse Trump of sexism and talked about the Trump Organization’s roster being full of female executives. He proceeded, very excitedly, to talk about how I could continue doing, in an official capacity, what I’d been doing as a surrogate to help change the public perception about Trump’s attitudes toward women and African Americans. “And that kid who shot up the black church doesn’t help us, either,” he said, referring to Dylann Roof, the twenty-one-year-old white supremacist who had recently opened fire during a church service, killing nine, in Charleston, South Carolina. Hillary Clinton had said on Nevada PBS the day after the shooting, “We have to speak out against [hate and prejudice]. Like, for example, a recent entry into the Republican presidential campaign said some very inflammatory things about Mexicans. Everybody should stand up and say that’s not acceptable.”
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 8
