Cue media firestorm and the Cruz camp accusing Trump of being a “coward” and “classless,” who’d launched another cruel attack on a woman.
On March 25, while two husbands vociferously defended their wives, I appeared on Don Lemon’s show on CNN along with the political strategist and head of Ted Cruz’s super PAC, a woman named Kellyanne Conway, who was not a Trump fan to say the least.
It started badly. Lemon asked me for my personal opinion about Trump’s retweet, and I pivoted to talking about anti-Trump super PACs. Lemon said, “I’m not going to let you do that! Omarosa, stop!”
When I tried to explain myself, he said, “Okay, let’s stop, everybody, cut the mic, everybody. We’re not doing that. I want everyone on this panel to answer the questions directly.”
He cut me off. He silenced me. I was shocked. Why have me on the show if he wasn’t going to allow me to make my case? I was incensed.
After a commercial break, I made the point that it was honorable of Trump to defend his wife.
And Conway, ready with “Trump’s woman problem” talking points, interrupted, “If you want to defend your wife, and let’s be very clear, it was not a pro-Cruz super-PAC or the Cruz quote team that put that picture out there, it was an anti-Trump PAC. Number two, and most importantly, if you defend your wife, why do you have to attack someone else’s wife? I mean that’s really the core question here . . . Seventy percent of all women say that they have an unfavorable opinion of him. And, look, there are those who say if you attack someone else’s wife, it is petty, it is rude, it is undignified. . . . Women out there are telling pollsters they don’t appreciate a leader who is—has to get the last word all the time or uses certain words. . . . Do you think he wants to talk about health care, education, taxes, destroying ISIS, or you want talk about wives? So let’s be honest who created this mess.”
I was used to talking circles around my opponents, but Conway could slither her way out of any debate.
On March 29, it was announced that GOP political operative Paul Manafort was coming on as the campaign convention manager and Rick Gates, a veteran political consultant, would be his deputy. I got a bad feeling about Manafort. He was the opposite of what we’d been campaigning for. We’d been rallying against special interests and Washington insiders; Manafort had worked for everyone in the establishment including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole. New York billionaire Tom Barrack recommended Manafort to Trump, though. Jared supported it. The argument was that we needed someone who’d done all this before.
I was worried about what direction he’d take us in. But then again, the GOP establishment hated Trump. Jared saw him as a bridge to unite the party before the convention. Corey could only see him as a threat.
The same day, Trump defended Corey against the battery charges that had recently been filed by Michelle Fields. At a Wisconsin rally, he mocked her complaint and insinuated that she’d changed her story many times: “I did not witness any encounter. In addition to our staff, which had no knowledge of said situation, not a single camera or reporter of more than 100 in attendance captured the alleged incident.” People in the crowd chimed in that her claim was “bullshit.” and that she was a “liar.” Trump also said he was a loyal guy, and he would be loyal to Corey.
I was booked with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s The Situation Room to talk about Corey’s evolving role in the campaign. I declined to comment on the legal aspect of the case, but said, “I mean, Donald Trump was leading by a great margin up until these recent events. I will tell you that, if he loses Wisconsin, I can guarantee that you don’t have to worry about Corey any longer, because he will become a liability and Donald Trump will get rid of him. . . . Whether he’s right or wrong, whether he did or didn’t, that’s not what’s important. The optics of this does not look good, and it does not reflect well on Donald Trump’s campaign.”
On April 15, four days before the crucial New York primary, we were blindsided when six former Apprentice contestants—season four winner Dr. Randal Pinkett, Kevin Allen, Tara Dowdell, Marshawn Evans Daniels, James Sun, and my old teammate Kwame Jackson; all of them black, except for James, who is Asian—rented a ballroom in New York and held a press conference to speak out against Donald Trump’s racism. The timing was intentional, to tank Trump’s chances in the New York primary. The blaring headlines—in CNN, NBC and Vanity Fair—were all versions of “Apprentice Stars Denounce Trump.”
I was at the campaign office in Trump Tower when the drama started. Trump heard about it, and I was called into his office to watch it with him.
Kwame Jackson started with, “Let us choose Kennedy over Kardashianism each and every time as a leading nation.” I thought, Here we go.
“Trump has created a toxic ecosystem in our political discourse,” he continued. “Trump has appealed to the lowest common denominator of fear, racism, and divisiveness in our populace. . . . You don’t have to lynch someone, you don’t have to burn a cross in someone’s yard these days to be a racist. There are very nuanced forms of being racist in 2016.”
My heart dropped as I watched this press conference. I knew that his words would strike a chord as he talked about Trump’s violence-inciting rhetoric, which we had been struggling to justify. Here were six former constants who, like me, were people of color, and they were calling him a racist. As the only Apprentice alum on the campaign, I knew that it would be up to me to figure out how to combat these accusations.
At my side, Trump said, “You f**king believe these people? F**king Kwame! I made these people, and this is how they repay me. No loyalty! Randall worked at Trump and now he hates me? No loyalty! None!”
I flashed back to taping season one of The Apprentice and rumors I’d heard ever since of Trump describing Kwame throughout the taping as “uppity.” Kwame got his MBA from Harvard. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business was also in the Ivy League, but compared to Harvard, I suspected that Trump felt that UPenn was a lesser Ivy. I always thought that Kwame’s Harvard credentials—like Obama’s—rubbed Trump the wrong way.
He asked me if I’d help to fix this. I said, “I’m on it!”
I booked several interviews on cable news, including a face-off with Randal Pinkett on MSNBC. My strategy was to say how much Trump had supported me in my career and to present myself as a counterpoint to their argument, a.k.a., “He can’t be a racist if he’s been so good to me.”
Meanwhile, Hope Hicks wrote a statement for Trump describing the former contestants as “six failing wannabes out of hundreds of contestants. How quickly they forget. Nobody would know who they are if it weren’t for me. They just want to get back into the limelight like they had when they were with Trump. Total dishonesty and disloyalty. They should be careful, or I’ll play hours of footage of them individually praising me.” In hindsight, it’s unlikely Trump would have pulled out any old footage. The world didn’t know about things he’d said in outtakes yet, but he did.
A few days later, we were all charged up. Finally, it was the New York primary. Trump really wanted to win in his home state. That night, Fox was broadcasting live in the middle of Times Square, and I was booked for an exclusive sit-down with Greta Van Susteren.
While I was doing that, the rest of the campaign staff was back at the Trump Tower party, watching me on the big TV screens. Immediately after the Fox interview, I was booked to do another hit with Katie Couric for Yahoo! Also on that panel was Kellyanne Conway, who seemed distraught that Trump was about to win the New York primary. When I saw Donald later that night, he said, “Great job on Greta! We all watched you live.” In the end, Trump won over 59 percent of the vote, and we watched as the Empire State Building lights turned crimson red, to indicate a Trump victory (if Cruz had won, it would have turned coral).
Hillary won, too, and the Empire State turned dark blue, not light blue for Sanders.
Everyone knew it’d be Trump versus Clinton in the general election now, but before we could shift to that contest, w
e still had to clinch the nomination.
• • •
SENATOR TED CRUZ dropped out on May 3, having put in a decent run, winning eleven contests, including the first, the Iowa caucus, and his home state of Texas.
Governor John Kasich ended his run on May 4. His one victory was my home state of Ohio.
In the end, Trump won an astounding forty-one contests. It was never even close. The Trump train was on track and unstoppable, despite concerted efforts from the opposition to do so.
On May 19, Paul Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman and chief strategist. Corey would stay on, Hope Hicks said in her statement, to manage day-to-day operations while Manafort would work on big-picture political strategy for the general election.
On June 20, Corey Lewandowski was fired. His exit was instigated by the Trump children and put the reins of the campaign solely in Paul Manafort’s hands. I had an uneasy feeling about this. Yes, Manafort had experience and a good relationship with the establishment. But couldn’t we have found someone who wasn’t an establishment denizen and better represented the campaign and the candidate?
Trump didn’t seem to like him, either. From the beginning, Manafort said, “I’m the one who can rein him in. I can make him more presidential.”
As soon as anyone tried to control Donald, he rebelled against them. Whatever Manafort asked for—that he use a Teleprompter, for example—Trump dug in his heels and refused.
On July 1, two months after Cruz dropped out, Trump hired Kellyanne Conway in a senior advisory position. Considering her previous vocal support for Ted Cruz and her earlier denunciations of Donald Trump, you can image my surprise when that happened. I thought it was a bit odd. One day, I was facing off with her on CNN, her saying rough things about Trump. The next, she was standing in front of me as part of the team.
We had made it. Trump was moving into July with the electorate united behind him. The Republican National Convention (RNC) on my home turf of Cleveland, Ohio, was just around the corner. I was ready for things to solidify for us.
Chapter Seven
* * *
Unconventional Standards
As we started our descent into Cleveland, it all hit me. This was my home state, and I was returning in triumph for the Republican National Convention, with my mentor about to be nominated as the party’s choice for president. As I deplaned, and walked through the airport, I saw Trump fever had broken out. Everywhere you looked, Trump posters, MAGA hats, buttons, and bobbleheads. The excitement was palpable, and I was there to see and experience it all.
It reminded me of flying into Los Angeles the year we were nominated for the Emmy for The Apprentice, hoping we were going to win against the odds. That time, we didn’t. But this time, we did. Throughout the primaries, the campaign and the man himself had been called a joke, and no one in the media thought he’d win. We arrived in Cleveland having defeated sixteen other contenders, winning forty-one contests, and now Donald Trump was about to accept his party’s nomination. After all the pain and anguish and challenges that we’d gone through to get there, I was just so excited, in part, because I thought, Now people will finally respect us and take us seriously.
As soon as I arrived at the Quicken Loans Arena, I started doing a series of media hits. MSNBC’s Craig Melvin broke the news that I’d just been appointed the campaign’s director of African American outreach. Even though I’d been one of the top media surrogates for nearly a year, the announcement made plenty of headlines. The Trump team, unlike HRC, was true to its word and had officially brought me on board as a senior adviser and director. Regardless of whether Mr. Trump was being taken seriously, I was.
Shep Smith at Fox News, asked, “Is the diversity thing going well?” By the end of the convention’s four days, I would speak to dozens of anchors for dozens of shows and on every news channel, a myriad of reporters from publications across the country. Along with my surrogacy work at the convention, I also hosted and spoke at diversity events around Cleveland, a panel, a lunch here, a meeting with various state delegations there, all with the goal of communicating to the world about the importance of diversity and the issues around minority communities.
I knew my work was cut out for me, but I was on top of the world that first day in Cleveland. Every media eruption I’d dealt with since his announcement, every time I went on TV to defend a controversial tweet or remark, every rally I’d attended, every constituent group I’d met with, had all led up to this crowning moment.
All of us felt a bit like we’d survived a shipwreck and had washed ashore at a luxurious resort. Inside the arena, it was bright, colorful, and exciting, nothing but positive feedback flowing my way.
I met many familiar faces for the first time there, like Ben Carson. As the director of African American outreach, it was my job to cultivate any prominent black support, and Carson was high on the list. In politics, your foe becomes your friend in the blink of an eye.
Outside the arena, hundreds of angry protesters raged on the streets of Cleveland, disgusted and upset that Donald Trump was about to accept his party’s nomination. The number of police and security guards and their intense, grim expressions reminded me of Chicago. We’d put up fencing around the venue, and people said we’d “built a wall” around Cleveland.
The largest and most vocal were the Black Lives Matter (BLM) groups. Many different chapters had descended on Cleveland, and it was my job to listen to them and respond to their issues. I’d been trying to sit down with leaders from the movement for a while, but since Black Lives Matter is decentralized—many small groups but no one leadership body—I’d reached out to Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University in Los Angeles, and one of the coorganizers of BLM in LA. I’d been trying to sit down with her since October 2015. I thought it could be an opportunity for us to talk about the issues and hear what BLM wanted from the Trump campaign, or in the unlikely event, his presidency.
In Cleveland, I reached out again, contacting several chapters’ leadership to arrange a meeting with me. They all flat-out refused. It wasn’t about meeting and talking. They were there to protest, and that was what they were going to do. My job was outreach, and I made a concerted effort, but whether someone agrees to meet with me is not up to me. I had hoped to take their concerns and requests to the leadership so we could resolve the issues, but we didn’t get a single step toward that.
I worked hard to meet with BLM because I believe the movement is needed. Too many African American men are being killed by police officers. Gun violence had taken my brother. I was most certainly aware and concerned about police violence, gun control, and systematic racism! I had protested the killing of Trayvon Martin, and in Ferguson, Missouri, about the shooting of Michael Brown. BLM is important and vital to African Americans.
I was disappointed that I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with the group during the campaign. I still think about the good it might have done, not only for BLM but also for DJT. Martin Luther King Jr. had met with Lyndon Johnson, and, against all expectations, the two joined forces to fight poverty in African American communities and to push for (and pass) the Civil Rights Act in their respective areas of influence.
Two days before the RNC, the NAACP kicked off its 107th annual convention, also in Ohio, in Cincinnati. I had reached out to the NAACP in early 2016 to set up a meeting, but it never happened. Then, as luck would have it, they were having their convention at the same time, in the same state as the RNC. The NAACP thought it’d be a great idea for Trump to hop on Trump Force One, fly to Cincinnati, and meet with leadership. I agreed to try to set it up. Unfortunately they invited him to come on the same night of Melania’s speech. He was not going to leave his convention and miss his wife’s big moment. We offered to send surrogates, like Ben Carson, Mike Pence, me, but they said no. The headline, of course, was “Donald Trump declines invitation to speak at the NAACP convention,” per the Los Angeles Times and dozens of other outlets.
> Like I said, uphill battle.
• • •
INSIDE THE BUBBLE, support and excitement.
Outside the bubble, hate and tension.
On social media, hate flowed like a river of lava at me. I would post a photo from the RNC floor, and the comments were full of racial slurs, insults, and death threats.
“House n****r.”
“Sellout.”
“Trump whore.”
“Token.”
“Her black card should be taken away.”
“Die, bitch.”
The ratio was about ten vile comments and death threats for every positive one. I reported the death threats to Secret Service, Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, and local police. So while I was fighting to be a voice and advocate for the African American community, external forces were trying to attack me. I was living in the dichotomy of joy and pain.
On July 19, Spike Lee posted on Instagram a photo of me with a clown nose and turned sideways with the caption: “Ms. Theresa ‘Omarosa’ Manigault ‘Pic Is Like This Cuz I’m Looking At Her SIDEWAYS,” he began in the caption. “Trump Has Named Her As His ‘Director Of African-American Outreach. You Might Know Her From Trump’s RealityTV Show The Apprentice. #Who’s Next? Step N’ Fetchit? Aunt Jemina? Uncle Ben? Sleep N’ Eat? Rastus? Lil’ N----r Jim? Omarosa Gonna Give Out Free Popeye’s Chicken With Sides To Deliver Da Black Vote To Trump? YA-DIG? SHO-NUFF. #blacklivesmatter.”
He used my mother’s name, Theresa. I can only assume that was to shame me to my mother? Why bring her into this at all?
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 11
