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

by Omarosa Manigault Newman

  I welcomed the change, as I was getting exhausted with running back and forth between the West Wing and the EEOB. If the president needed anything from now on, he would go to his chief of staff. Kelly also demanded that, if by chance, the president contacted you outside the outlined protocols, you were to come to his office and debrief him on your exchange with the president, no matter how brief or trivial the topic. Most of the APs rolled their eyes at these requests. In my mind, I realized how little Kelly understood the job he was about to undertake. He also had no idea what he was in for.

  When the first 5:00 a.m. call from the President came post-Kelly takeover, I told Donald that he had to curtail his communications with everyone, especially by cell phone. He asked why. I told him that Kelly wanted everything to go through official channels. And I didn’t disagree. The president went back to his NYC days and said, “F**k Kelly! I will do whatever I want to do!”

  I did not debrief Kelly on this conversation with the president.

  I was used to talking often with Keith Schiller, whom I had known just as long as Donald. Keith confided that he was fed up with the way they were treating him. Apparently, Kelly was also trying to install boundaries between the president and his longtime body man.

  I begged Keith not to leave. “If you go, DJT will really lose it.”

  The bright side of Kelly becoming COS: I could lobby him directly for the extension of temporary protected status (TPS) that stopped the deportation of immigrants from Haiti and other South American countries, which was set to expire.

  We made a commitment to work closely with the Haitian community in particular during my visit there. This was the top priority for President Jovenel Moïse, who requested an extension of the TPS.

  The new chief of staff made some dramatic and immediate changes, such as closing the door to the Oval so that President Trump could not see who was passing outside. The only way into the Oval was by passing his assistants Madeleine Westerhout, Keith Schiller, and John McEntee. This change, he reasoned, was to block pop-ins via the back entrance to Donald’s dining room, and to rescind what were known as walk-in privileges to trusted advisers. Due to my Secret Service–issued “kiss pin”—so called because it allowed you to get in close proximity of the principles—I could still move freely throughout the whole complex.

  Leaked reports to the press described me as Kelly’s first test subject of people to keep away from the president. Ever since I’d been blamed for the Mika face-lift tweet, the prevailing opinion inside the White House was that my “dirty dossier” deliveries were the reason Donald would fly into rages and lose an entire day of productivity while in a snit.

  I requested meetings with General Kelly to discuss this and other OPL concerns, but he would not give me an opportunity to meet with him. If I were put on his schedule, he canceled. From his arrival in late July until my departure in mid-December, Kelly and I spoke to each other exactly twice. The first time was in his office during a meeting where he informed me that Secretary DeVos wanted to cancel the fall HBCU conference (more on that later), and second, when he locked me in the Situation Room and threatened me with a court martial.

  The idea of limiting Trump’s exposure to people might have seemed wise at first. But what it actually did was cut him off from trusted friends who kept him grounded and somewhat sane. Kelly’s move to isolate Trump drove him crazy; he watched even more cable news and relied on phone calls and social media—even more than before—to satisfy his deep need for positive feedback, in-person affirmation of his greatness, and an ear to vent to.

  Every piece of paper that went to the president had to go through handlers first and then to Kelly to review. He couldn’t prevent Donald from calling people from his private line in the residence, or from using his personal cell phone. Nor could he stop certain people whom DJT cleared to call directly through the White House switchboard. Donald sometimes called us from a nontraditional phone he borrowed from a military aide or a visitor, which was not always secure, as a reaction to Kelly’s crackdown.

  Kelly also sent word that APs in particular were required to brief him on any conversation that Donald and we had, per the Presidential Records Act. Failing to do so would put us in legal jeopardy, a threat meant to intimidate or dissuade us from talking to the president.

  Most of our conversations at the time were of my listening to Donald rambling incoherently, speaking in random fragments, veering from thought to thought and topic to topic: the election, fake news, Clinton emails, trade, Obama tapping his phones, and all the people who’d slighted him.

  Here is a snippet of one of those conversations, to the best of my recollection:

  “Hey, I’m going to meet about, you know what? This guy’s a good guy. China, the people, look, China is getting us. These guys are no good. But the wall, the wall.” It would have been ridiculous to write a memo about each one of those conversations on substance. At the time, I was uneasy about documenting evidence of his mental impairment or decline, for all of posterity.

  So Kelly limited office visits. Every document passed through him. Every phone call had to be briefed. Nothing went in or out that he didn’t approve first.

  Who was the president now? Kelly seemed to be setting himself up to be a Dick Cheney figure, pulling the strings, controlling the president and calling the shots.

  I didn’t swear an oath to serve at the pleasure of John Kelly. As miserable as things were at the White House, and outside it, I reminded myself of my commitment, and did my job to the best of my ability.

  On August 11, I flew to New Orleans to speak on a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). The panel, moderated by Ed Gordon of Bounce TV, was called “Black and Blue: Raising Our Sons, Protecting Our Communities.” I was asked to speak for the first time publicly about the murder of my father and brother and how violence had impacted my life.

  I learned in coverage of the event that some panelists dropped out when they heard I was coming. Some members of the black press were not covering me objectively. About three months before the panel, I’d been invited to a luncheon for the National Action Network’s annual convention in New York. After I spoke briefly about what I’d been doing to support black colleges, Al Sharpton got up and said, “You are in a very precarious position, because you represent an administration that many of us disagree with. But I would not be loyal to what I am if I did not address those issues and ask you to go back and tell them, ‘Yes, they were respectful. . . . No, they would not allow me to be silenced, but they told me to tell you that we as blacks and women are, in the first 100 days, seeing a disaster in Washington, DC.” He scolded me like a child in front of a room full of my peers at a women’s luncheon. It was carried live on CNN and C-SPAN. I was disappointed with another missed opportunity to connect with the civil rights community.

  I got out of there as soon as I could.

  And here I was again at NABJ, right back in the lion’s mouth.

  Within five minutes on the panel, Ed Gordon pushed me to defend Trump about some of the inflammatory things he’d said—namely, that cops on Long Island should get “rough” with suspects who were predominantly people of color. I didn’t agree with that! Not in the slightest! I stuck to my purpose, to say that I understood as well as anyone the pain of losing a family member to violence, and that I sympathized with the families of people who’d been beaten or killed by the police.

  Black Lives Matter activists in the packed ballroom stood up in their seats and turned their backs. Others shouted at me and raised their fists. Some jeered and laughed as if I were a joke. This protest was different from the kind I was used to. At least Sharpton had asked me to deliver a message. Some people at the NABJ just wanted to kill the messenger. “When you have someone in the room,” I said, “you don’t beat the hell out of them. You inform them of what’s going on in the community so they can be an advocate. You don’t walk away from the table, because if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”r />
  Gordon kept hammering at me to defend Trump. He came from behind the podium and got right up in my face. In the video posted on YouTube you can see how he looms over me, intending to be aggressive. The panel was about violence, and ironically I felt physically threatened sitting in the white leather chair on the stage. He came from behind the podium and stood over me. I tried to bring the conversation to ways to protect families, but he kept pushing me to justify Jeff Sessions’s stance on immigration, for example. There was no hope of having a productive discussion, so I rose with my microphone and stood up to this bully and told him, “Don’t be aggressive. Ask your question but don’t lecture me . . . You can ask about the loss of my father and my brother—ask about my story. I’m not going to stand here and defend every single word or decision [of the Trump administration] . . . If you don’t want to be here, don’t be here, but don’t disrespect the story of my father and my brother.” The president of the NABJ got up to take control of the situation and ended the program. I headed for the exit.

  “Poor @OMAROSA. Offended when asked about Trump, same day as UVA Nazi rally. She had never realized that her only relevance is as Trump’s pet”

  —Keith Olbermann tweet, August 12, 2017, 7:45 a.m.

  “A PET? His animal? Keith! Really? These types of highly offensive inappropriate statements explain why you were dropped from TV! #FireHimGQ”

  —My response, August 13, 2017, 4:45 a.m.

  Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Unite the Right rally had begun. The stated purpose was to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate hero, from Emancipation Park, the name of which the City Council had changed from Lee Park two months before. But that was really just an excuse to stage a full-on sheet-wearing, gun-toting, swastika-waving jamboree of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Southern militia members, and the type of people who had a Confederate flag painted on the roof of their pickup truck.

  I was still in New Orleans, at a small meet-and-greet with leadership hosted by the NABJ’s president. On television, we saw the images of young white men, looking furious and hateful, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “You will not replace us.” “You” being any nonwhite, non-Christian person. (The chant morphed to: “Jews will not replace us,” which was captured in a VICE documentary that went viral.)

  I immediately sent a note back to the White House, asking if they were monitoring the situation. I was told that they were keeping an eye on it.

  The media blamed Donald J. Trump and Stephen Bannon for the rally, citing racist rhetoric, dating back to the very first day of his campaign, that his policies and speeches gave permission to racists to crawl out from under their rocks into the light of day.

  Back in the early campaign days, I went on TV and defended Donald’s rhetoric, saying, “He’s not racist; he’s racial.” I pointed out our history together the last fourteen years, and how well he’d treated me, what he’d done for me professionally, how he’d invested in my TV show and my career. Given our relationship, I couldn’t believe he was a racist—but the people at this protest obviously were! The rally was attended and promoted by David Duke, white supremacist Richard Spencer, and the extremist neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. I can find no evidence that Breitbart promoted the rally, but Bannon’s news site has long been known as the foundation of the alt-right, which is how many of the Unite the Right protesters identified themselves.

  The next day, I sent a message to Tom Bossert and asked, “Do you have an eye on this situation? Are you watching this?” It was a national security issue as far as I could see. Bossert and Jared were in Bedminster, New Jersey, with DJT.

  When the counterprotesters—anti-fascists known as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, church groups, socialists, and others—showed up, the situation escalated to violence, and some thirty people were injured. At about 1:45 p.m., twenty-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi from Ohio, drove into a crowd of protesters, injuring nineteen and killing Heather D. Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old paralegal.

  A woman was killed on the streets in broad daylight in an American city, by a neo-Nazi. And the police in riot gear had not intervened or put a stop to this.

  It was unthinkable. I called Bossert again. The protest had been raging for two days already without a comment from the president. Bossert told me that, after Fields drove into the protesters, he had gone into the room where Donald was resting at Bedminster after a round of golf and said, “Sir, you have got to wake up. This has escalated, and we have to deal with it.”

  While the entire nation was glued to their TVs, outraged and terrified by what they were seeing, desperate for the strong hand of leadership, the president was napping.

  They discussed whether to call Governor Terry McAuliffe and offer federal assistance, but the decision was made to leave the tactical response to the local and state level and not make it a federal issue. McAuliffe did declare a state of emergency, and the Virginia State Police arrived, but the National Guard was not sent in. The White House decision on Charlottesville was to stand down and let Virginia handle it. McAuliffe praised his forces, but according to two independent evaluations, many grave errors were made by the local police. They did not intervene when protesters and counterprotesters fought on the street, and took no action to prevent the fighting. They were aware of the hostile nature of the torchlit rally but did nothing to stop it. They had no central command, which caused confusion.

  As it unfolded in front of my very eyes on TV, I feared that our failed handling of the events in Charlottesville would go down as one of the bleakest stains on the Trump presidency, in terms of race relations. It defines his inability and inadequacy in dealing with the complexities of race in this country.

  His first horrible mistake was to stay silent for twenty-four hours. When things go south, Trumpworld goes dark. That is their MO. Every surrogate was pulled off air. The only person to go on the Sunday news shows on August 13 was Tom Bossert. As a result, people tried to label him as an apologist for Donald, but he does not deserve that. He was the only one who had the guts to go on air and express compassion for the people who were hurting, and to discuss what was going on.

  On Monday August 14, Donald issued a statement that condemned violence and said, “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” He mentioned Heather Heyer and the two Virginia State troopers who were killed in a related helicopter crash. For many, the statement was too little, too late and didn’t sound sincere.

  On Tuesday, August 15, Trump was scheduled to hold a press conference at Trump Tower to announce the rollback of regulations that would be part of his infrastructure bill. I was back in DC, watching the live press event from the White House on TV. As it was conveyed to me by someone who was there, Trump was surprised by how many press people turned up for an infrastructure discussion. He had no idea how explosive the Charlottesville situation had become over the last four days. He had not been properly briefed for the press conference, and when he got off the elevator in Trump Tower, he was faced with hundreds of press organizations from around the world.

  The public fear was real and legitimate. People around the world felt deep terror at the sight of neo-Nazis beating up innocents in front of a church, Klansmen carrying torches, militia brandishing machine guns on the street in open-carry Virginia. These images conjured the worst moments in our collective consciousness about racial atrocities, our nation’s shameful past dragged into the present. A dear friend of mine called me to say, “O, I’m scared for my kids and my community.” I understood why she’d be afraid of white supremacists, but she said, “No, I’m scared of your boss, Trump.”

  I wanted to tell her not to worry, that I was there, the guardrails were in place. But, for two days, a race war had raged in the open in an American city. Until Charlottesville, I couldn’t allow myself to
process how bad things had become, because that would mean confronting things I’d noticed and ignored about Trump all along. My blind spot was shattered during that press conference, though. I could see with my own eyes that Trump had no idea what people were so upset about. He just did not grasp it. He was disconnected from reality.

  He came down the elevator into the lobby of Trump Tower. The doors opened, and there was a wall of press in front of him. The elevator banks were behind him. He had nowhere to go and no choice but to give his prepared talk on building regulations. He was under fire, with no means of escape, and he was irritated that this whole matter wasn’t over and done with already.

  After reciting his regulations speech, which was a long brag about how great his buildings were, he took questions from the press. He was asked why it’d taken him so long to condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He said it was important to “take it nice and easy,” and that he was waiting until he had all the information. That was BS. I knew he had all the info from Tom Bossert. He had gone dark for twenty-four hours because that is what he and Trumpworld do when faced with complicated issues or crises.

  His nonverbals told the story: Trump was waving his hands aggressively, pointing his fingers with hostility. He moved like he was being attacked. A young woman was dead, and he was only thinking about his own discomfort.

  He said, “How about a couple of infrastructure questions?” He had no concept of the magnitude of Charlottesville and wanted to move on to business as usual. This man did not have one ounce of empathy.

  Any normal person would know that he should have been talking about what was going on from the moment the rally began. He should have instructed the National Guard to go in to establish order and better assist the local government to respond and stop the violence, not stand by and allow it to unfold. He should have calmed the fears of all the Americans who watched images that conjure up one of the darkest period in our history, replayed by the twenty-four-hour news cycle. He should have called for a day of mourning, a day of prayer, a national symposium on race. He should have talked about the unity we desperately needed.