Later, still on day two, Trump spoke at the CIA headquarters in Virginia and harped on the inauguration crowd size, saying, “We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech! I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there [was] practically nobody standing there. And they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.’ Liars! Fake news!”
When I was asked about the crowd size, I didn’t want to tell him the inaugural committee had made getting tickets for the black community nearly impossible for me and Tucker Davis. There was even talk of charging people to attend. I’d spoken out in one of the committee meetings, saying emphatically that most black people would not attend the inauguration and would definitely not pay to go to Trump events. Tucker and I submitted list after list of possible names, with only half of them being approved, as if space was limited. We were frustrated and baffled about the pushback. I could have explained to the president why the attendance at the inauguration was so low, but it wouldn’t have made a difference at that point.
Instead of a triumphant second day of the Trump presidency, we were drowning in exaggerations, protests, and side-by-side photos of the Washington Mall of Trump’s modest inauguration draw of 306,000 next to Obama’s 2009 record-breaking 1.8 million crowd. The Women’s March massive turnout—at least five hundred thousand in DC; five million worldwide—rankled him, too. The president simply could not stand to be outsized by a bunch of women in pink hats or a black man, especially that black man.
Immediately, the comms team gathered to discuss the matter. Twenty minutes in, the lights in the room went out, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn them back on.
The Obama administration had installed an energy-saving system so that the lights switched off after a certain amount of time. So if we were in a meeting that ran longer than twenty minutes, the lights would suddenly go out. Once we found out about that, someone would have to wave a hand in front of the sensors to turn them back on, and we’d start again. It was so tiresome, we’d say, “Just leave them off.” Eventually, we got the engineers to come and adjust the timer. But for the first week or so, we were literally and figuratively governing in the dark.
Sean Spicer, the recently appointed press secretary, after speaking with President Trump in the Oval, came up with the solution. “We’re going to back him up,” he said. “If the president says there were a million and a half people, we’ll reinforce that.”
On day two, January 21, I attended Sean Spicer’s first official press briefing. I sat next to Stephanie Grisham, Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. We looked on as Sean declared, “[T]he largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” It was hard to keep a straight face as Sean proceeded to lie to the American people and then refused to take questions from the press corps. Kellyanne Conway went on Meet the Press the next day. Chuck Todd asked her why, at Sean Spicer’s very first press briefing, he’d said an easily verifiable falsehood to the American people and whether lying about something small like this would mean he’d lie about bigger, more important issues as well. She dug the hole ten times deeper by saying, “Sean Spicer gave alternative facts.” She then pivoted to the failures of Obamacare and the public education system. She also accused Todd of being biased against Trump, setting an adversarial tone with the media from day three.
• • •
Congrats on your appointment to serve as an Assistant to the President for our 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. What an absolutely historic weekend it will be!
The President would like to host you and four guests at the White House this Sunday (1/22) for a small ceremony and private gathering to honor you and your hard work for him and our country.
Thank you!
Katie Walsh, Deputy Chief of Staff
On day four, my mother, the widow who worked two jobs and twelve hours a days to feed her four children in the Westlake projects, was there to see her daughter sworn in to serve the president at the highest level at the White House. She was joined by my friends Shannon Jackson and Aisha McClendon, who had worked in the Clinton White House with me twenty years ago. My experience of that day was filtered through my mother’s eyes and how grateful I was to her for everything she’d done for me. That I’d been able to make her proud didn’t scratch the surface of what I hoped to do to repay her for her suffering and sacrifices on my behalf. We took lots of pictures with the president, the vice president, and the other APs and their families.
In our comms meeting we discussed the number one topic of the day, Kellyanne’s use of the phrase alternative facts. Kellyanne was thrilled that her clip with Chuck Todd had been watched by millions and made headlines in every newspaper in the country. I started to get the feeling that Kellyanne was as passionately engaged with her own media presence as she was with the Trump agenda.
Meanwhile, I was still waiting for tables and chairs—and mousetraps. The White House is a very old building and its longest living residents are mice. Every time we moved furniture we would see them scurrying into little holes in the historic walls.
Also on day four, Trump signed an EO reinstating the Global Gag Rule that banned federal funding to any international health organization that provided abortions or gave out any information to women in need. While he signed this directive about women’s access to reproductive health care, he was surrounded by Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Rob Porter, Steve Bannon, and a few other white men in dark suits. For a man who was all about optics and “central casting,” it was a disaster. Because women’s issues fell under the umbrella of the OPL, I had to field the calls of protest and concerns from women’s constituency groups. I told the senior staff, “We can’t do anything as it relates to women, women’s rights, again, ever in this administration, without first engaging women’s rights groups and definitely not with a bunch of men standing behind the president.”
When I mentioned it, people seemed annoyed that I pointed out Hope’s rookie mistakes and Reince’s unforced errors. But I felt I had to. No one else was bold enough to say it out loud.
Mike Pence’s presence was particularly offensive to women’s groups. His record of legislating against reproductive health rights is among the most aggressive. During his years in Congress and as the governor of Indiana he signed eight laws in less than four years to restrict abortions in his state, including the fetal anomaly bills that would have forced providers to cremate or bury fetal remains; forced women to have preabortion counseling, where they were told that they were destroying human life; and banned women from aborting fetuses that had been diagnosed with physical or mental disabilities and lethal conditions. A federal judge in Indiana later blocked the law from going into effect because it unconstitutionally limited a woman’s right to an abortion. In Congress, Pence cosponsored a bill that said hospitals could refuse to give a woman an abortion, even if she would die without receiving one, with the one exception of “forcible” rape (as if all rape weren’t forced); thankfully, it did not pass. He has legislated to limit women’s access to birth control and has fought funding for Planned Parenthood.
Trump, Pence, and their posse were undoing any hope of connecting with women and minorities. He’d surrounded himself only with elite, wealthy, white, conservative men. I’d agreed to take on an epic responsibility to be the voice of my community and women of color in the White House, and I realized at that moment just how steep my climb was going to be.
On day six, January 25, Trump repeated his false claim that three to five million people cast ballots illegally. He was still litigating the November election, and would continue to do so over and over again, to this day. He was obsessed with the election, and he was furious when it came out that he’d lost the popular vote by millions. For his first few months in the White House, Trump
kept big charts in his private dining room, in his den, in his study, that showed the electoral map color coded in red and blue. Most of the country was coded red, while the most populous urban centers were coded blue. When anyone walked in, he’d point to the chart and talked about the election results. If you walked in in the morning, he’d tell the story of his victory, with the visual aid of the chart. If you walked in in the afternoon, you’d hear the same story again, verbatim.
It was very concerning to listen to him go on and on about the election in private. He would get all worked up and get crazed about the “fake news” reports. I was worried that in his first week in office he was already cracking under the pressure.
We all had work to do, and things to discuss, but he only wanted to talk about the election. When he tweeted about things like illegally cast ballots, my concern was taken to a higher level, because now his obsession was in the public realm, which meant that we had to deal with it publicly.
I believed that if we gave him the right data, he’d talk and tweet about that verified information. We were in the White House, with every resource available to us to get the most accurate data imaginable. For days, I thought there had to be a glitch in the flow of accurate data to him. The correct information was delivered to him in his morning briefing folders—always with headlines from his love-to-hate newspapers the New York Times and the Washington Post on top—but he ignored it in favor of unverified info.
The question became, was he just making things up or was his intel coming from outside the White House? We quickly realized that the president, a gluttonous consumer of media, had been going on Twitter and picking things up from disreputable, random sources, taking what he read there as fact, and reposting for all the world to see. We needed fact-checkers, or at least a filter for POTUS Twitter posts.
The directive came down from Reince that our default position was to back up whatever the president said or tweeted, regardless of its accuracy. In fact, much of my days—from the first to the last—were spent strategizing and defending Trump tweets and statements to constituency groups that he may have offended on that particular day.
By day six, I’d established a daily routine:
7:00 a.m.: Arrival at the White House through the East Gate
7:30 a.m.: Morning huddle in Sean Spicer’s office in the West Wing
8:00 a.m.: Senior staff meeting in Reince’s office with about thirty people—the APs, Jared, Ivanka, Gary Cohn, General Kellogg, Spicer, Bannon, Kellyanne, et al.
8:45 a.m.: Breakfast at the White House Mess
9:00 a.m.: The OPL meetings in the EEOB
11:00 a.m.: Back to Sean’s office for daily prep for press briefing
1:00 p.m.: Daily press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
2:00 p.m.: Back to the OPL for constituent calls or meetings
5:00 p.m.: The OPL staff meeting
6:00 p.m.: All-comms wrap-up meeting in Sean’s office
Throughout the first one hundred days, whenever the president had a listening session in the Roosevelt Room, I was always standing nearby or seated behind him. When he signed an EO that related to diversity, women, veterans, any OPL group—from truckers to college presidents—I was in the Oval or other locations with him. Whenever I took point on an event—for example, going to the Smithsonian during Black History Month—I briefed him at least twice before each one. So in my official capacity, I saw the president three to four times a week.
As for unscheduled pop-ins—the times when the Oval door was open, he was seated inside, he saw me walking by and called me in—I saw him two or three additional times per week. That was how I met the Canadian prime minister. I’d just left a meeting in the Roosevelt Room and he yelled, “Hey, Omarosa, come meet Justin Trudeau!” Don’t mind if I do. . . .
Most presidents did not do casual pop-ins. They stuck with their schedule. The Clintons were an exception. The culture of that administration was more relaxed. Betty Currie was Clinton’s assistant, and she was a “Come on in!” open-door type of person. When I was a mid-level staffer there, I could walk in for a meeting or bring my family by to say hello. Perhaps that operational dynamic was too casual, allowing interns passage into the Oval’s private areas, for example.
Trump was used to how he conducted business in Trump Tower, where he had an open-door policy and if anyone had a question or needed to talk, you just poked your head into his office. He hadn’t made the shift yet to White House protocol. I hadn’t made the shift yet, and whenever he invited me in, I’d go, scheduled or unscheduled. During our unscheduled meetings, the president led the conversation to whatever was on his mind, from the travel bans to Obamacare to what he had for lunch. Donald likes to talk, and he really likes having people around to listen. About once a week, he called me and said, “Have you been avoiding me? I haven’t seen you in a while. Check my schedule and come by,” even if I’d seen him the day before.
I think he was lonely and liked seeing a familiar face.
I was in the unique position of straddling two worlds throughout my year in the White House—working in comms in the West Wing, and the OPL in the EEOB—running all over the complex, from one meeting to another, all day long and deep into the evening.
On day eight, I appeared on The View. Beforehand, Donald prepped me for my interview and told me to be tough and not to let them push me around. He said, “Go boardroom Omarosa,” meaning cool, calm, and deadly. We laughed. He said to particularly watch out for Joy Behar, who used to be a friend of his and Melania’s, and he had the pictures to prove it. “But she turned on me like a snake,” he said.
I asked for and received a briefing from the White House surrogate team and The View producers with a list of topics they wanted to discuss with me: my role in the White House, my first week in office, the Women’s March. They invited my fiancé, John, to come sit in the front row for the taping, too, to talk about our upcoming wedding.
Of course, the questions they actually asked were not on the list at all. Hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin hammered away at me about tax returns, insults to the disabled, p***y grabbing. Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox anchor, was lovely; she was the only one. I batted back the hostility point by point, until I noticed the one-minute warning sign flash. They hadn’t acknowledged my fiancé at all, who had flown in from Jacksonville, or our upcoming wedding. I broke into the conversation with less than sixty seconds remaining to introduce him and close a contentious segment on something nice, as promised. My closing line went viral. I said about John, “I’m so happy that he’s here with me, and he brings me such joy. And I hope that you one day, can find that kind of joy, Joy, in your life.” She looked agitated.
Donald called me the next day before 5:00 a.m., and said, “Good job, good job, way to hit back. You still got it. I liked how you went off on Joy. She used to kiss our asses, and now she’s anti-Trump. Fuggedaboutit.”
On day nine, the “talker” of the day fell squarely on my plate. Trump had signed an EO to ban people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen to enter the United States for ninety days. The first travel ban dealt with the treatment of minority groups, so it was in my portfolio. It predominantly impacted people of color.
In the comms meeting, I argued that the travel ban had set off a panic in Democrats—and many Republicans as well—that their worst fears were true, that Trump was a monster, a racist, a persecutor of minorities. I said, “It advances the perception that the administration is discriminating against people of color from around the world.”
Senior staffers countered, “Well, Muslim is not a race, it’s a religion.”
To my mind, that was even worse. It was a blatant ban of an entire religion!
In a senior staff meeting around this time, Stephen Miller ran through a litany of ideas on how to deter immigration, including the tactic of separating children from their parents at the border if they tried to enter the country illegally. We didn’t discuss the pros and cons at the
time. It was just one of many ideas on his list. I never thought in a million years that it would ever be implemented. It was the antithesis of who we are as Americans. Stephen Miller always was a fount of ideas, and some of them ran to the extreme.
In these meetings, Mike Pence defended Trump, saying, “God is telling me to support the president. God is telling me I’m here to serve.” He was being directed by a higher deity to agree with Trump no matter what. When he’d been tapped for VP, people said that he’d bring a different perspective—a moral, Christian perspective—and speak out for compassion. But the only time he’s spoken out with indignation since he’d been chosen as Trump’s running mate was when General Michael Flynn lied to him about Russian sanctions.
The rollout of the travel ban was poorly coordinated, to say the least. Officers and customs agents at airports had no guidance about how to implement the policy. The melee at airports took some by surprise. Much of our catch-up work centered around the lack of coordination and the lack of messaging to go along with it. We had little or no warning about the details of the ban—which was a ban, then wasn’t, then was again.
Throughout the drawn-out travel-ban litigation, whataboutism really came to the forefront. “What about the fact that Obama put these countries in a list himself!” “What about Obama’s record with deportations of illegal immigrants?” In Trumpworld, the only defense for most situations was “whataboutism,” mostly about Obama and Clinton.
I reckoned that Trump’s push for the travel ban and mass deportations was a reaction to Barack Obama’s stats on deportations. Donald Trump was trying to again one-up President Obama, who was nicknamed “deporter in chief” for his skyrocketing millions of deportations. I’m sure Miller or Homeland Secretary General Kelly had given him the numbers of how many people Obama deported within the first year, second year, and so forth. Trump wanted to be the crackdown president; he had to deliver on his campaign promises. But he also really wanted to outdo Barack. This entire episode was a sad opening to the presidency, along with being morally reprehensible.
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 19
