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

by Omarosa Manigault Newman

  Around the time Maria struck Puerto Rico, Trump attended the United Nations General Assembly. I also joined the delegation to attend sessions related to famine. I was pleased with the $575 billion contribution that the US made to fight hunger for twenty million Nigerians, Somalians, South Sudanese, and Yemenites, but I also pressed for more aid and asked that the US establish a famine commission. My meetings and sessions were powerful and reflected the kind of work that was an extention of my personal ministry. I made strong connections with each of the countries’ delegates and was eager to continue.

  During the UNGA, Trump was scheduled to give a major speech to the full body. General Kelly sat in the audience with Melania. When Trump said, “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” General Kelly dropped his face into his hands, a gesture that became known as the facepalm felt around the world. However, the truth is, Kelly was not necessarily as exasperated as he appeared. Rumors circulated around the West Wing that Kelly suffers from excruciating migraines—which possibly began during his military service—and he was in the throes of one of those episodes at the assembly. According to a source close to Kelly, the stress of his new role, the noise and light in the room, and the pressure triggered the migraine and he had no choice but to sit there and suffer through it. As bad as it was to put his face in his hands, it would have looked far worse if he’d walked out. As an officer, his service is compromised by this affliction, and he doesn’t talk about it and prefers to appear to be made of stone. But when he gets a headache at work, he is vicious, bordering on cruel to his staff.

  “White House HBCU Conference Still On Despite Calls to Cancel Event,” Associated Press, August 25, 2017

  My plate was full with organizing the Trump administration’s first White House Summit on HBCUs. In the wake of Charlottesville, there were calls by the CBC and other groups to cancel the HBCU conference. I immediately pushed back against these critics and continued to plan. This conference had taken place every year for twenty years. It was a campaign promise of Trump’s and was mandated by the executive order he’d signed back in February. The students who had been selected to serve as HBCU all-stars were excited about making the trip to DC; I truly did not want to let down the fifteen hundred participants who were registered, especially the one hundred student representatives.

  The number one driver for cancellation was none other than Secretary Betsy DeVos. Perhaps she was still reeling from being booed at Bethune-Cookman’s commencement, and wasn’t inclined to support the historic event. Not surprisingly, she went to John Kelly and asked him to force me to cancel it.

  I was summoned to his office and told that he had something very serious to discuss. He used his best ramrod-straight military posture to intimidate me and said, “Secretary DeVos does not want to go forward with the event. So I’m going to shut it down.”

  I didn’t flinch. “We cannot cancel the event because of her. We can’t let the students down.” I laid out my case and told him that it was a White House event, that she would not have to be involved if she didn’t want to, and that the event should still move forward. He said he would allow me to proceed but that if it failed, I would own it solely. I heard from a member of the HBCU staff that DeVos was livid that the event was moving forward.

  A week after my meeting with General Kelly, Betsy DeVos tried to shut down the event by sending out a blast notice that it was off, and then she canceled the contract with the conference’s hotel. By doing so, she cost the US government $75,000 in cancellation fees. She did not care! I was angry and upset but did not let her actions destroy what I had worked for. We quickly countered her notice with a statement from the president announcing that the summit would now take place at the White House and would go three days rather than five.

  The White House conference center could only hold three hundred people, so I decided on the fly to scale down and break up the conference into a series of small sessions. We’d register each session until capacity was reached, and then close it off. Hosting at the White House also solved any security concerns. To enter, you had to be vetted and cleared.

  To the dismay of all the forces working against me, I had one person in my corner—President Trump. He saw me in the Roosevelt Room after a meeting and asked what I was up to. I told him I had a few minor problems with the HBCU conference. I called out no one in particular, which might have distracted him. I just let him know what I needed. He made one call, and all road blocks were removed.

  Suddenly, accommodations were made, funds were available, catering fell into place, and the conference center was secured.

  In a comms meetings to nail down the messaging for the conference, I had to deal with Kelly Sadler. She said, “Are you sure about doing this? You’re bringing some very angry people into the White House. After Charlottesville, they might riot. They might burn the place down.”

  Sadler was famous for her inappropriate commentary in comms meetings. When Trump tweeted about the transgender ban in the military, she agreed on principle and said in a comms meeting that I attended, “Why should we pay for soldiers to get their d**ks cut off?”

  I said to Sadler, “The students are the best and brightest in our community, who carry themselves with dignity and class. If they protest at all, they’ll do so peacefully.”

  After all this craziness, the conference was moving forward. Sarah Sanders received questions about it in her briefing. She reinforced that I was moving forward. “It’s happening, and registration is full,” she said.

  The same people who’d called to cancel were now begging to attend.

  I turned to the president again when Secretary DeVos refused to give opening remarks to the HBCU all-stars. As a result, the head of Cabinet Affairs, Bill McGinley, told her she had to give the opening remarks.

  It went off without another hitch, and I was relieved after the success of the conference. Much of the press commented on the reduced size and the controversy about it, but the students loved it. I considered it one of the high points of my time serving at the White House.

  Right on the heels of that success, though, came bad news. Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard and friend of many years, left at the end of September. I knew that without Keith, the president would probably become unhinged. I spoke with my husband and a few friends, and we all agreed the best time for me to leave would be in January—what is known as the “one-year anniversary exodus”—when many staffers leave their White House positions. It would give me more time to find a possible replacement for African American outreach.

  • • •

  ON SEPTEMBER 22, while campaigning for Luther Strange in the Republican primary in Alabama, Trump said of NFL players who took a knee during “The Star Spangled Banner,” “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, you’d say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired!’ ”

  Trump had first grabbed hold of this issue a year ago, in September 2016, during the campaign, when Colin Kaepernick began the trend to protest police violence against African Americans. When Trump mentioned it at a rally, he got a huge cheer, and that was it. He incorporated it into his greatest hits and played that tune whenever he needed to quickly rile the base. His calling black players unpatriotic was completely designed to trigger latent racial resentment in a certain population of people who were predisposed to resent wealthy black men who weren’t grateful enough about their lot in life. The sentiment could be summed up as, “Shut up and play.”

  The Trump tactic was to reframe the issue. The players took a knee for social justice. Donald reframed it to be about patriotism, saying that if they didn’t stand for the national anthem, they weren’t patriotic; they were against the military.

  You won’t find a single player who
would agree with that.

  At first I thought Trump didn’t understand why the players, and, in time, many of the owners, were so offended by his remarks. I put together an extensive briefing memo for the president to make sure he was properly informed on the issue. I’m certain he never read it. As long as DJT got cheers when he trashed these powerful black men, he was not going to stop.

  “Trump Said ‘Despicable’ Racist Comments about Blacks, Jews in Taped ‘Apprentice’ Meetings, Claims Former Producer,” Newsweek, October 5, 2017

  In October, Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt started talking about the N-word tape again, this time, on the NPR podcast Embedded with host Kelly McEvers.

  McEvers brought up Pruitt’s October 2016 tweet about the Trump Tapes and his offensive language. Here is the relevant conversation.

  MCEVERS: Was it just about women?

  PRUITT: No.

  MCEVERS: Mostly about women.

  PRUITT: Very much a racist issue.

  MCEVERS: It was about race.

  PRUITT: Yeah.

  MCEVERS: About African Americans, Jewish people, all of the above.

  PRUITT: Yep. When you heard these things, there’s the audible gasp that is quickly followed by a cough, kind of like (gasping), you know, and then (coughing)—yes, anyway, you know? And then you just sort of carry on.

  MCEVERS: Is there ever a time when you think, I wish I would have told him not to say things like that?

  PRUITT: That’s a really good question. It was not my place to be, hey, TV star, you know, reason we’re all here, shut your [expletive] damn mouth, and don’t ever, ever repeat what you just said. Of course, you know, you think that. You go back to your hotel room or your apartment that they put you up in. And you know, you do some soul-searching.

  His interview must have triggered some soul-searching in the far reaches of the Apprentice world. Soon after, I heard more rumblings about the N-word tape. During the campaign, Mark Burnett’s office had sent out reminders to everyone about their NDAs. The message was clear: forces were trying to protect DJT.

  A truly unique situation came up on October 9, when Ivana Trump, the president’s first wife, went on Good Morning America to promote her new memoir, Raising Trump, and said, “I’m basically first Trump wife. Okay. I’m First Lady.”

  She also said of Melania, “I think for her to be in Washington must be terrible.”

  After watching the interview, I immediately went over to the East Wing to see how Melania was taking it. She was furious. My recommendation to a member of her staff? “Melania needs to put that Ivana in her place! Those are some fighting words!” No one knew how to calm Melania down.

  I didn’t understand why Donald didn’t step in. By not shutting Ivana down, he was empowering her to say whatever she wanted on national TV, about Melania or him! Donald should have tweeted that he had only one First Lady, Melania Trump. Personally, I think he enjoyed the Real Housewives of the White House spat. He loves to pit people against each other and watch them fight it out, even those closest to him. In fact, whenever Donald and Melania weren’t on speaking terms—which was very often—he would call Ivana and ask her for advice. What could upset the current wife more than the husband calling up the first wife for advice?

  Even then, in the comparatively halcyon pre–Stormy Daniels days of October, Melania was counting every minute until he was out of office and she could be a private citizen again.

  “Wacky Congresswoman Wilson is the gift that keeps on giving for the Republican Party, a disaster for Dems. You watch her in action & vote R!” Trump tweet, October 22, 2017, 5:02 a.m.

  A crisis rocked the White House, and specifically General Kelly, in mid-October. There is a bit of backstory: On October 4, four soldiers were killed in an ambush gone wrong in Niger. One of them was Army Sergeant La David Johnson, married to his childhood sweetheart, Myeshia Johnson, the mother of his two children, and pregnant with a third. Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson had known La David Johnson his whole life, long before her time in Congress, and had been his mentor in a special program for young men who aspired to be in the military.

  After much pressure for Donald to make a condolence call to the fallen soldiers, he called Myeshia on October 17. Wilson happened to be with her at the time and listened to their conversation on speakerphone. As she recounted on CNN over two interviews, Trump showed no empathy for the widow, saying, “[Your husband] knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurt.” Also, Trump didn’t remember La David’s name. As soon as the call ended, Myeshia, said Wilson, “broke down.”

  On October 18, Trump tweeted at 4:25 a.m., “Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!” Sarah Sanders accused Wilson of politicizing, and said her having listened in on the call was “appalling and disgusting.”

  In response to Trump’s tweet, the fallen soldier’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, who also heard the call on speakerphone, told the Washington Post, “President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband.”

  It continued to escalate. On October 19, General John Kelly held a press conference at the White House to continue to beat down this grieving widow. He explained the protocol for alerting family members of a soldier’s death, and recounted the circumstances of his own son’s death in Iraq. He said that he’d been the one to tell Trump what to say on his condolence calls. He then said, “I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning, and brokenhearted at what I saw a member of Congress doing. A member of Congress who listened in on a phone call from the president of the United States to a young wife . . . It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred.”

  So Trump’s lack of empathy on a condolence call was being reframed by Kelly as an act of moral inferiority on the part of Congressman Wilson, whom he would not even dignify by using her name. He continued to trash Wilson, telling another story about her being “an empty barrel that makes the most noise.” As he told it, at the dedication of a new FBI building in Miami to two fallen agents, the congresswoman stood up and took credit for securing the funding for the building, making the ceremony all about her. This, too, “stunned” Kelly.

  The next day, the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale posted a video from that dedication ceremony, and showed that Congresswoman Wilson had not stood up and taken credit for the building’s financing. Kelly lied, or he had a very racist memory of being offended by a black woman even when she did nothing inappropriate.

  The day after that, at the daily press briefing with Sarah Sanders, reporters wanted to know if Kelly would apologize or admit he was wrong. Sanders said, “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you, but I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.” In other words, when a general lies to smear a black woman, it’s business as usual.

  Now, if you followed this story in the news, you have heard all this before. What you don’t know is what was said behind the scenes. In a senior staff meeting right after Wilson came out and said the president made a war widow cry, Kelly spoke of Myeshia with such disdain, it shocked me and many others in the room. He said, “How dare she put the call on speaker? How dare she not just be grateful to receive a call at all?”

  The president had waited two weeks to make that call. In the meantime, he was railing against NFL players and in a rage because Rex Tillerson, as it came out, had called him “a moron.” He was fixated on that, saying, “He’s the moron! I’m a genius! My IQ is genius level. He thinks he’s a big shot! I’ll challenge him to an IQ test!” His rants were so repetitive and unending, I learned to tune them out as much as I could. If you engaged him on the topic, you would lose an entire day.

  He only acknowledged the death of those four soldiers because the media challenged him to make the call. Just like putting o
ut the statement about Charlottesville, he resented being forced to do the right thing. And Kelly was furious and “stunned” that two black women—a pregnant widow and a seventy-five-year-old grandmother of five—could come out of this quagmire looking far more moral and dignified than he did.

  I found every aspect of this story to be disgusting and appalling, but particularly Kelly’s use of his own son’s death as political cover for Trump’s failure and his irrational anger at the women involved. This was the man who refused to look at me in meetings, who’d refused to speak much more than a word to me in three months, who would, in good time, attempt to smear my reputation with lies. Kelly’s loathing of Congressman Wilson could only be based on his hatred of black women. It was certainly not based on her actions. This is the same man who said that the Civil War was about compromise.

  • • •

  TRUMP MADE HEADLINES on November 15 when, during a speech in the map room, he awkwardly reached for a bottle of water and then used both hands to drink it. People made fun of him about it, but I found it worrisome. I had been concerned about his health for quite some time.

  During the campaign, I had expressed concern for his medical health and what a doctor’s exam would reveal. I was told by a member of the family, “Don’t worry, the doctor won’t let Donald down.” The doctor was Harold Bornstein. He provided a glowing review of Trump’s health in September 2016 that sounded too good to be true. Of course, it wasn’t true. Bornstein told CNN in May 2018 that Trump “dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write it. I just made it up as I went along.” He also said that in February 2017, soon after Trump became president, three people had gone to his office and taken the entire Trump file, thirty-five years of medical records. The trigger for the “raid” might have been Bornstein’s telling the New York Times about Trump’s previously undisclosed use of Propecia for hair loss and a rosacea drug. As he told NBC News, “I couldn’t believe anybody was making a big deal out of a drug to grow his hair.” The doctor said he felt “raped, frightened and sad,” and could have taken it further, but he never did. He had to have known how dangerous these people were.