None of that. He wanted an infrastructure question.
When pressed, Trump mentioned Heather Heyer and said, “Her mother on Twitter thanked me for what I said.” The woman’s life had been destroyed, and he was bragging about a tweet? It was all about him. He had no capacity whatsoever to understand what Heather’s mother was feeling. Trump’s greatest character flaw is his total lack of empathy, which is itself a function of his extreme narcissism.
Trump constructs his own reality to make himself look good, even in horrible situations, and then he repeats it over and over again until his distortion becomes the only version he knows. His lies and boasts are only, always, about making him look better, e.g., “Her mother thanked me.” The difference between Trump and world leaders who may be a tad bit narcissistic is that he can’t function unless everything is about him. He has to be at the center of everything. If he’s not in the middle of it, he’ll force himself in the middle. So, it’s not that a young woman died, it’s that her mother liked his tweet.
While I watched, I kept thinking that the infrastructure presser should have been canceled, or they should have wrapped, or he should have been ushered away. His gestures were getting jerkier, and I could see his anger building. He was not well! He was acting impaired.
When he was asked if he had missed an opportunity to bring the country together—I yelled YES! at the TV—but his response was to brag about the economy. “I’ve created over a million jobs since I’m president. The country is booming. The stock market is setting records. We have the highest employment numbers we’ve ever had in the history of our country,” which had nothing to do with racists driving cars into crowds of people.
When asked about senior adviser Steve Bannon, Trump said, “I like Mr. Bannon. He’s a friend of mine. But Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through seventeen senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that. And I like him; he’s a good man. He is not a racist, I can tell you that. He’s a good person. He actually gets very unfair press in that regard.” He stood there and defended Bannon, which was perceived as his apologizing for a racist. Also, he could not help but bring up the election, again, even now.
During this incredible unraveling, Trump also trashed John McCain for voting against his health care bill, called reporters fake news, pointed out that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, questioned the validity of removing racist symbols like Confederate statues, defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazis for having the proper permits (they didn’t, actually), made a dig at Obama for not fixing race during his eight years as president, and touted that he’d brought a car factory to Wisconsin. Trump’s mental decline was on full display during this press conference. I was certain everyone would see it and that it would be the headline of every paper the next day.
The most incendiary remarks were, “I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides—I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it, either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say the same. . . . You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
When he said those words, I could not believe that he was equivocating, not fully understanding the precarious ticking time bomb he was lobbing. I recognized by his posture and his tone that, if he’d been in private, he would have gone full DTN: “Donald Trump nuclear.” He kept talking and kept digging himself into a deeper hole. Nobody protected Trump from Trump that day. When he challenged the press for not reporting “accurately,” he was saying, “I’m right. You’re wrong. You’re all lying to make me look bad.” It was a terrible example of how flawed Donald’s thinking was. He was unable to see the hurt, pain, and fear his words were inflicting on the nation with his total lack of empathy.
Matt Lauer and Today reached out to me to come on and talk about Charlottesville. I declined the offer. I refused to defend the indefensible.
Who fell on their sword this time? On August 18, Bannon left the White House. His presence was evidence enough of Trump’s racism for many people. But the only reason Bannon was there in the first place had nothing to do with ideology. Many in Trumpworld suspected that it was all about money. If mega donor Rebekah Mercer insisted that Trump bring in Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and David Bossie, Trump did it. But because Bannon’s alt-right connections could have dragged down the presidency, he had to go. It worked out well for Steve. He’d felt thwarted in government and, for a while, he’d been trying to leave and return to Breitbart, where he was boss and could do and say whatever he wanted.
His exit from the White House was mutual, according to all reports. Trump tweeted, “I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton - it was great! Thanks S.”
It was around this time I began to plan my own exit. After Charlottesville, I could no longer tolerate Trump’s behavior. It was reprehensible. Strategically I had to find the perfect time to leave without making waves.
A few months later, after Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury came out and Bannon was revealed to be the author’s number-one source, Trump changed his amicable tune. He made a statement on January 3, 2018, that said, “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” Two days later, he tweeted, “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”
If you leave or betray the Trump cult, you are labeled crazy and pathetic. Trump did not care that he completely contradicted himself after he’d tweeted nice things about his departed senior adviser. He changed his tone only after Bannon appeared to go against the grain. It is a pattern the White House repeats often. Lying is second nature in this administration.
Things started to settle down a little and we went a whole week scandal free, until the day of the solar eclipse. Louise Linton, the thirty-seven-year-old Scottish actress wife of Treasure Secretary Steve Mnuchin, posted a photo on Instagram of herself and her husband walking down the steps of a private government plane with the caption, “Great #daytrip to #Kentucky! #nicest #people #beautiful #countryside #rolandmouret pants #tomford sunnies #hermesscarf #valentinorockstudheels #valentino #usa.”
Jenni Miller, a mother of three in Portland, Oregon, commented, “Glad we could pay for you [sic] little getaway. #deplorable.”
And then Louise fired back: “I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day ‘trip’ than you did. Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours. You’re adorably out of touch.”
Well, the entire Internet exploded, saying that Louise Linton was the one who was “out of touch.” The political ramifications were that her husband was working on redoing the tax code to benefit the rich, that Trump’s entire cabinet was packed with millionaires and billionaires who couldn’t relate to and didn’t care about the common “forgotten” men and women who’d elected him into office.
Through a mutual connection in Los Angeles, Kelly Day, Louise got in touch with me and asked me to lunch at her home in DC soon after she issued an apology to that mom in Portland. I found her to be very glamorous, very Hollywood, a far cry from the typical Washington wife.
She told me that she’d been following the advice of her publicist to tag the designers she was working with. I explained that as a representative of the US government, she was with her cabinet-member husband in front of a government plane—and she’s not supposed to take gifts or use a public platform for private gain. She explained it to me in a straightforward style as a small misunderstanding and said she’d be more conscientious of “things like that” going forward. “I just don’t understand how Washington works,” she said sincerely.
&n
bsp; Linton was tone-deaf but not malicious. I sympathized with her. She was being attacked by the press, and so was I, day after day. As silly as her posting was, she was suffering, and that was what I clued into during our lunch. Few people can fully understand how it feels when the whole world seems to be against you.
On August 25, Trump pardoned Arizona Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who’d been convicted of criminal contempt following a lawsuit against his department’s racially profiling Latinos at traffic stops without cause and detaining them in concentration camp–like tent cities where Latinos were publicly humiliated, forced to labor in chain gangs, and denied basic medical care and supplies.
Trump wasn’t done yet trying to convince doubters that he was definitely not a racist . . . yet bent over backward to help a man who clearly was.
For me, it was another brick in Trump’s racist wall, but I was finally able to see over it. The distinction I’d made between racial and racist, with regard to Trump, was a deception I had used to convince myself. It would be a while yet before I could see the clear picture on the other side of that wall, but I was getting there.
During the campaign, I had justified his rhetoric as just political—what he resorted to in order to connect with and stir up the base. But seeing his policies and pardons, I couldn’t justify his actions anymore. It hurt to see the truth about him. Imagine if you had a mentor, a friend, someone you looked up to for nearly fifteen years, someone you sacrificed a lot to stand by under fire, who suddenly revealed himself to be your worst nightmare. I didn’t want to believe it. I rejected what other people said about him because they didn’t know him like I did. I had to go through the pain of witnessing his racism with my own eyes, and hearing it with my own ears, many times, until I couldn’t deny it any longer.
This kind of dawning does not take place in an instant. I fought it desperately, until it was impossible to do so. Part of the reason it took so long for me to come to this realization was that I don’t throw around the term racist lightly. There is a difference between being a racist, racial, and someone who racializes. During seminary I came to read a book called Divided by Faith, which explains that.
But if you recognize that we live in a racialized society and label someone racial, you can work with that. I wanted to work with Donald to understand his broken outlook, and I believed I was teaching him about the danger of starting a cultural war, a race war, of stirring up these dark elements in our society. But when the bricks in his racist wall kept getting higher, I had to wonder if, despite everything I previously believed, he did want to start a race war. The only other explanation was that his mental state was so deteriorated that the filter between the worst impulses of his mind and his mouth was completely gone.
I wanted to leave the White House, Trumpworld, and Washington DC.
At the end of August, I was one foot out the door. I called Armstrong Williams, Ben Carson’s top adviser, newspaper columnist, political commentator, conservative media and marketing empire builder, and my friend for nearly twenty years, to ask for advice.
I said to him, “That’s it. Charlottesville was the last straw. I’m leaving.”
Armstrong said, “It’s almost September. Your HBCU conference is in three weeks. Are you going to turn your back on those students?”
The National HBCU Week Conference from September 17 to 19 was what I’d been working toward since day one. It was going to be the culmination of all my efforts, starting with pushing for the EO in the first forty days of Trump’s presidency to move the HBCU office from the Department of Education back to the White House, where I could oversee it and sponsor events, like the upcoming conference. In addition to the meetings and panels of HBCU students and administrators, one hundred HBCU all-stars were visiting DC, some for the first time.
Armstrong said, “Are you really going to let down all those students? Don’t let hate win. If you leave now, all those kids won’t get what they need.” He talked me off the ledge, but I was still ready to jump. I had to discuss it with Donald himself.
When we discussed Charlottesville, Trump was defensive and said, “Omarosa, you know what was in the report,” referring to all the information about the Antifa groups who were involved in the counterprotest. There were some strident groups, but there was no moral equivalency between fascists and anti-fascists. He doesn’t understand that, politically and morally, they could not be put on an equal plane.
Due to his lack of empathy and his narcissism, he did not possess the capacity to draw distinctions between angry groups of people and failed to understand what had happened in our country during that crisis. I didn’t forgive him, defend him, or apologize for him. I put my head down and got to work to finalize what I needed to do for my three-day conference and hosting duties for hundreds of conference attendees.
On the last day of that long, horrible month, Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin refused to commit to the Obama-era initiative to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, replacing Andrew Jackson. His excuse was flimsy: “It’s not something I’m focused on at the moment,” he told CNBC. I know Trump wanted to dismantle Obama’s legacy, but this, too? I quickly wrote a decision memo about the matter and gave it to Trump. While flipping through the folder, he came to the picture of Tubman, the woman who personally brought more than three hundred slaves to freedom, risking her own life every time, and said to me, “You want to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?”
Just hold on until the conference is over, I told myself. Just get through September, and then I’ll be free.
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
The Fall
My autumn months in the White House can only be defined as bizarre. Where the previous seasons were notorious for their crises, intensity, and conflict, my final season was just strange and full of odd surprises.
The first major crisis came in the form of hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria, one after the other.
Harvey hit Texas and Louisiana in the final days of August and did major damage. President Trump visited Texas twice in one week, on August 29 and on September 2. Within thirty days, more than $1.5 billion in federal disaster relief was paid to Texans. All told, Trump deployed more than thirty-one thousand federal and FEMA staff. FEMA delivered three million meals and three million liters of water, in addition to providing temporary shelter to more than thirty thousand people displaced in Texas and Louisiana.
Irma hit closer to home for me, battering Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina on September 10. Trump visited Florida four days later. FEMA and federal staff deployed dozens of incident management assistant teams, mobile response teams, and urban search-and-rescue task forces to all five states and delivered 7.2 million meals, forty-one generators, and 5.5 million liters of water within days. The storm hit Jacksonville and caused major damage and flooding. It was difficult to concentrate when my husband and mother and our church members and community were in harm’s way.
And then there was Maria. It hit Puerto Rico on September 20. Trump did not visit the US territory until October 3, two weeks later. It took FEMA a week to deliver meals, and when they did, the meals contained chocolate bars, cookies, and potato chips. They hired independent contractors to provide thirty million meals ready to eat (MRE), but after nearly a month, only fifty thousand were delivered. The electricity is still out on much of the island to this day. At a press conference, Trump said, “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget out of whack.” The death toll was originally reported to be sixteen, which he said was nothing compared “to a real catastrophe” like Katrina. “Sixteen people certified,” Trump said. “Sixteen people versus in the thousands [with Katrina; the actual stat is 1,833]. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”
When Trump and Melani
a finally visited the island, they went to a relief distribution center near San Juan, the Calvary Chapel. He famously threw rolls of paper towels at the devastated victims who’d lost homes and didn’t have enough food or water. He defended that cavalier behavior in the face of human tragedy by telling Mike Huckabee on his Trinity Broadcasting show, “They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels. And I came in, and there was a crowd of a lot of people. And they were screaming, and they were loving everything. I was having fun; they were having fun. They said, ‘Throw ’em to me! Throw ’em to me, Mr. President!’ So, the next day they said, ‘Oh, it was so disrespectful to the people.’ It was just a made-up thing. And also when I walked in the cheering was incredible.”
Just like Charlottesville, it was all about him. The devastated people loved him! He was unfairly persecuted by the media. Everyone was having a great ol’ time! His total lack of empathy is bad enough, but I believe many of the problems and delays with getting aid to Puerto Rico were partly political. The mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, was openly critical of the US response. I would not put it past Trump to punish the people of Puerto Rico to teach that woman of color a lesson.
Puerto Rico is still in complete disarray. No matter how loud the outcry, the administration was lethargic in its response. Puerto Rico will be among the worst stains on Donald Trump’s presidency. And God bless Tom Bossert, who tried to get the resources, tried to fight. He and I were fighting arm in arm, hand in hand, to try to advocate for Puerto Rico to get what they needed, and John Kelly shut it down.
In the National Security meeting, he said, “Their infrastructure was already screwed up,” and suggested the bankrupt government was trying to exploit the hurricane to force the United States to foot the bill to rebuild their electrical grid. Kelly, like Trump, referred to Puerto Ricans with derogatory terms many times. The death toll—immediate deaths, those due to disease or illness in the aftermath—is still unconfirmed, but a 2018 Harvard University analysis says the actual number is 4,645, due to lack of access to medical care and electricity, being cut off from aid, stress, and other hurricane-related effects.
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