Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House

by Omarosa Manigault Newman

  In a Daily Beast article about the controversy of my being part of the Trump administration, Joy Reid noted that long knives were reaching for me. And, again, I was the only black woman, the only person inside the West Wing, who was fighting day in and day out to support HBCUs, for Pell Grants for minority students, protections for Muslims, reproductive rights for women. Yet, the hot take on me was that I was ambitious (horrors), opportunistic (the shame!), vengeful, assertive, demanding—the very qualities that helped most cabinet members and senior advisers secure their position.

  Perhaps I should have just groveled gratefully.

  • • •

  AT THE END of April, Kellyanne and I were invited to the NRA Annual Meeting in Atlanta. She was asked to be the keynote speaker at the Women’s Leadership Forum for female members. If a Republican White House official is summoned to attend an NRA convention, there is no question that you had to go. Seventy-seven percent of the gun-owning members of the five-million-strong organization were Republicans.

  Although I was fascinated by the intensity of the women gun lovers, I was even more riveted by Kellyanne’s performance, praising Jeff Sessions’s law-and-order approach to every problem and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s reversal of a ban on lead ammunition in national lands. I had no idea what her position was before this event, but at that panel, she was outgunning all the other women in the room with her passionate Second Amendment zeal. Kellyanne was a chameleon, and she could change her camouflage depending on which candidate she supported or which room she was in.

  Trump spoke at the main event, and recounted his election night victory, as always, and promised the crowd that as long as he was president, the NRA had a friend in the White House. As he came off stage, he said to me, “Great energy, right? Great show!” We next motorcaded to a fundraiser less than a mile away. As White House staffers, it would have been improper for Kellyanne and I to attend the fundraiser, so we were locked in a room for propriety’s sake, and had a quick meal there.

  We flew back with the President on Air Force One, my first time. It was thrilling to be on the plane, even for the less than two-hour flight. I went around taking pictures of the famous conference room and the president’s Oval office.

  The president and I talked about guns on that flight, and I learned that he owned a .45 caliber Heckler & Koch pistol and a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. During one of the GOP primary debates, I recalled that Trump had said, “I do carry on occasion, sometimes a lot. I like to be unpredictable.” I felt a bit of a chill, putting that together with his famous claim at an Iowa rally in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” That was certainly true of the folks I met at the NRA meeting.

  Also on that flight, I spoke at length for the first time with Dr. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s physician who also oversaw the White House medical program. He showed me Air Force One’s mini surgical suite where open-heart surgery could be performed and said, “Come on in, I’ll check your vitals.”

  Dr. Jackson served a function similar to concierge doctors in Hollywood. I’d seen this during my time in LA—celebrities paid a huge premium to have a doctor on call who would write them any prescription they wanted. Throughout my time in the White House, as a part of a little known program called the executive medical program, the cabinet and all APs, could get prescriptions for any ailment. They would give out anything, right from the bottle, no prescription needed. Say your back was hurting. You’d go in and complain, and walk out with a month’s supply of powerful pain medication. The logic behind the free flow of meds was that the cabinet and APs had to keep ticking. We couldn’t have insomnia or fatigue or be bothered by back pain. All we had to do was ask, and we would receive whatever pill we wanted.

  On May 5, the head usher of the White House, Angella Reid, the first woman and second African American to hold that position was fired. Although Reid was a carryover from Obama, having held the job since 2011, it was not considered a political position and it was unusual for an incoming president to fire an usher.

  I was upset because it meant one less black woman in the building, less than two months after Trump fired Shermichael Singleton, Ben Carson’s senior adviser at HUD, because of an article he’d written for The Hill website that was critical of Trump. I made a point of asking everyone in the senior staff about Reid’s firing.

  “We can’t keep getting rid of black people for flimsy reasons,” I told a number of people. As comms director for OPL, “I need to explain why this woman was let go.”

  The official line: “We don’t discuss personnel matters.”

  The unofficial line? That she wasn’t very well liked and, allegedly, Trump didn’t approve of her handling of his tanning bed. I’d heard he was unhappy with her efforts to procure the bed, to bring it into the East Wing securely, to find a discreet place for it, and to set it up properly. Also, apparently, Reid just hated him and didn’t hide her feelings about it.

  • • •

  AS THE WHOLE world is well aware, the Trump presidency in May 2017 was defined by what we on the inside summed up with one phrase: the Russian Concussion.

  On May 9, Donald fired James Comey, the director of the FBI. The public reason was that he disapproved of Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump’s famous letter to Comey included this extraordinary sentence: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nonetheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

  Of course, the firing was all about Comey’s rejection of Trump’s loyalty demand. Trump had been talking about firing Comey for weeks, but I never thought he’d go through with it.

  During one of my visits he asked, “Hey, Omarosa, what do you think about Comey? I had to let him go, right? He couldn’t be trusted; he was not loyal.”

  I appeased him by saying, “Hey, you did what you had to do.”

  No one—and I do mean not a single person in the White House—agreed with his decision. But they didn’t dare tell him that. He was so all over the place at that point; anything could trigger fits of rage, and you did not want to be on the receiving end of one of those. He could get very worked up about the leaks. He wasn’t happy about the staff; Ivanka and Jared were urging him to get rid of Reince and Sean. Others were bombarding him with issues he needed to deal with.

  The comms team briefings on the Comey firing are incredible documents in the art of “alternative facts.” The talking points will sound familiar to any news junkies, because you have heard them repeated on Fox News and by Trump spokespeople verbatim for months. For example, “Director Comey has lost the confidence and respect of the FBI rank and file” and “President Trump concluded that the only way to restore confidence in the FBI—the crown jewel of American law enforcement—was to end Director Comey’s tenure.” As the month went by, Donald changed public opinion of the “crown jewel of American law enforcement” quite a bit.

  Hope Hicks was in charge of all the president’s interviews, including the ones conducted by Lester Holt for a prime-time NBC special about the Comey firing on May 11. She and counsel prepared him to deny any collusion with Russia. It was the wisest strategy, because he could remember it. Donald thought he would get away with just saying, “There’s no collusion. There’s no collusion. There’s no Russia. There’s no Russia,” that that would be enough to convince the American people that there wasn’t. As time went on, his relationship with Russia would be revealed like an onion, one layer at a time.

  For the Lester Holt interview, I watched it on a small TV in the upper pressroom (the lower pressroom was built on top of the old swimming pool and turned into the briefing room) by the press secretary’s office. Throughout this erratic and contradictory interview, I kept thinking, Oh no! Oh no! This is bad!

  Donald rambled. He spoke gibberish. He contradicted him
self from one sentence to the next. Hope had gone over the briefing with him a dozen times, hitting the key point that he had fired Comey based on the recommendation of the DOJ, which the vice president and other surrogates had been reinforcing for days. He’d already slipped up when he’d told the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office that he’d fired Comey for doing a poor job. And then, with Lester Holt, he changed the talking point again, saying, “I decided to fire him.”

  Holt tried to help him. He said, “In your letter, you said that you accepted [the DOJ’s] recommendation.”

  “But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey,” said Donald. “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”

  It was all his critics needed as proof that Trump had lied. I’d known Donald to exaggerate and boast. He’d told white lies and lies of omission, ignorance, or misunderstanding. He’d bent the truth purposefully to make himself look good. But this was different. It was like he didn’t know what the truth was or couldn’t remember what he’d previously stated as truth. The outrage was immediate.

  While watching that interview, I realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain. His mental decline could not be denied. Many in the White House didn’t notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when. They thought Trump was being Trump, off the cuff. But I knew something wasn’t right.

  But what could I do? Declare a state of mental emergency for Donald J. Trump? Should I report this insight to . . . to whom exactly? The White House doctor Ronny Jackson, whose job depended on Trump’s approval of him, a man who would go on to declare an obviously obese, sleep-deprived man in excellent health? To the chief of staff, a man I didn’t trust or respect? To Don Jr., Ivanka, or Eric, who had to be seeing what I saw, and had done nothing? To Melania? She was completely trapped herself. And what would I say? “I’m not a doctor, but I think the president is losing it?”

  I texted Lara and said, “Hey, can we catch up? Let me know when you’re in the building.” When she came by in a week or so, I said, “I’m really concerned about him.”

  She said, “I know. The whole situation is really messed-up.”

  “No, I mean his language is incoherent. This is more than just a—”

  “No,” she said, like she didn’t want to hear it.

  “I think he needs to get checked.”

  She shook her head and said, “It’s fine.”

  Even having the conversation with a family member was a risk. If news got out that I thought the president was delusional or mentally impaired, the impact on national and global stability could be cataclysmic. I would eventually talk to several high-level people in the White House about my concerns, and they all shut me down quickly and decisively, with warnings.

  I was operating out of concern for a friend, but the friend in question was the president of the United States. And, as of May 17, that friend and his campaign and administration were under investigation by special investigator Robert Mueller for collusion with the Russians, an investigation that was spurred, to a large degree, by Trump’s contradictions about the firing of James Comey.

  In mid-May, Mika Brzezinski made a shocking claim about Kellyanne Conway on Morning Joe. “This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion, and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say, ‘Blech. I need to take a shower!’ Because she disliked her candidate so much,” said Mika.

  Joe followed that up by saying Kellyanne described the campaign as her “summer vacay,” meaning, she’d taken the job to finance a vacation to Europe. “[She said] ‘I’m just doing this for the money. I’ll be off this soon,’ ” claimed Joe.

  I’d marveled at the speed with which Kellyanne’s allegiance changed during the campaign. While working for the Cruz super PAC, she criticized Trump daily and called his integrity and character into question. And then, when she changed camps, she was gung-ho for him. Any sane person would look at that 180 and naturally assume she had her own reasons for taking the job, and that it had nothing to do with Trump’s beliefs and vision for the nation.

  The claims on Morning Joe fit the calculated swamp monster I took Conway for.

  In our daily senior staff meetings at the White House, she agreed with whatever Trump said. Although the president never wanted anyone to disagree with him, I believe Kellyanne’s “yessing” turned into white noise, a sound that didn’t register on his brain.

  I remember, back during the campaign, flying on Trump Force One with her, Donald, Jared and David Bossie, between events. The guys were having a heated debate about some issue or another. Kellyanne kept trying to contribute to the conversation.

  From her seat across the aisle, she said, “Guys, listen . . . Well, I think . . . No, hey, what about . . .”

  The men completely ignored her.

  She said, “No one is listening to me!”

  Not to say that the men weren’t rude in how they ignored her or that she didn’t have a relevant point to make, but it seemed to me that she had overestimated her status on the campaign. It was possible that she was appointed to that role for the optics. Trump had a woman problem. Lo and behold, a woman was put “in charge” of the campaign.

  In another part of Trumpworld, Michael Cohen tweeted a photo of his daughter Samantha in a black bra and black tights, and captioned it, “So proud of my Ivy League daughter . . . brains and beauty channeling her Edie Sedgwick.” The Twitterverse cringed en masse and accused Michael of following in Trump’s footsteps by boasting creepily about how hot and sexy his daughter was. He responded to one critic with classic pitbull style, and said, “Beauty and brains you a-hole!” To another who wrote Cohen was posting “spank-bank material of his own daughter,” he replied, “Jealous?”

  I knew Samantha well. She’d been doing an internship in Melania’s office, and Michael came to me and said, “They have her cutting newspaper clips all day long. Can she come to your office to finish her internship? She needs to use her brilliant brain!” I put her to work rebranding Michelle Obama’s Let Girls Learn program. She did a wonderful job with her report and even presented her project to the staff at the Peace Corps. Cohen was a proud dad and just as proud of her smarts as her looks. The aggressive defense of his tweet was wrapped up in his love for her.

  Also in May, Mike Pence quietly formed a PAC, the Great America Committee, run by campaign strategist Nick Ayers. It is generally unheard of for the VP of a first-term president to start a PAC. Ayers said its purpose was to support other GOP candidates, to pay for Pence’s travel and other bills. Around this same time, many people were saying that Trump would soon be impeached and that President Pence had a nice ring to it. Ayers had been a Pence person for a while already. In good time, he’d become Pence’s chief of staff in the White House, and Corey Lewandowski would take over the PAC.

  My suspicions about Pence only increased when I learned about his PAC. Donald gave him unprecedented access and he happily accepted Pence’s fawning praise and dreamy glances. If Donald wasn’t careful, his second might try to stab him in the back. While in New York, I set up a meeting with Mike’s nephew John Pence at the campaign office in Trump Tower. I told him of my concern about the PAC. He assured me that it was shut down and was not as nefarious as the press made it out to be.

  On May 22, Donald and Melania flew on Air Force One to Tel Aviv, Israel, landing at Ben Gurion Airport where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara greeted their counterparts with fanfare and a red carpet laid out for the Americans on the tarmac. As usual, Donald walked ahead of Melania down the plane steps—a habit of his that the media and Twitter found rude, chauvinistic, or just mindless. After a few words were spoken to the small crowd, the two couples
continued down the red carpet to waiting limos. Donald walked ahead, and then, he reached back to take Melania’s hand. She swatted his hand away with a flick of her wrist and walked elegantly on.

  I saw the coverage from my office in the EEOB, and watched the “hand slap” on four channels simultaneously, in super close up.

  The very next day, the first couple flew to Rome, and Melania avoided hand-to-hand contact with Donald again, in full view of the waiting press spray. They stood at the top of Air Force One’s staircase and waved. Then Donald tried to take her hand, and she quickly moved to brush hair out of her face to avoid him.

  It was simply not possible that Melania was unaware of the tremendous reaction the world would have to these small gestures. I believe that something was going on with the two of them privately—one can only surmise that it was about the many allegations of his sexual misconduct during their marriage, or her upcoming relocation to the White House. Unlike the past, when she had no recourse or influence, she no longer had to accept her powerlessness. I believe that by avoiding Donald’s clasp in public, Melania was grasping the full extent of her new power. At any time, if she so desired, she could humiliate him in public with small, ambiguous gestures, just as he’d openly humiliated her with his affairs and lascivious behavior for years. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.

  When she moved into the White House in mid-June, people on the staff hoped that she’d be a calming influence on him, but I didn’t see how that could be possible. Their relationship did not appear to be nurturing or intimate; it was understood long before she moved to DC from New York that she would have a separate bedroom in the residence, just as she had a separate bedroom at Trump Tower.

  To close out the month, Trump went to a NATO summit in Brussels, and shoved Duško Marković, the prime minister of Montenegro, out of the way so he would be standing in the center of the group photo. Of course, he was called out for the move. I asked him, “You came off a little aggressive. Why did you do that?”