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

by Omarosa Manigault Newman

People suspected that there was a relationship between Fox News and the Trump campaign, and that there were people at Fox working tirelessly to get him elected. To all those people, I can confirm that you have no idea just how right you were. The back-and-forth of daily communications between individuals at Fox and the Trump White House continues to this day.

They chose McIver as the sacrificial lamb, but they needed to keep her under control, so she was not fired. If they had fired her, she would have been free to tell the world any number of Trumpworld secrets.

He’s always wanted to be president . . . I mean vice president!” one of his brothers said with a wink. It was a real joking-not-joking look, and I filed it under “keep an eye on that situation.”

I believe she did know better. She was playing to an audience of one, the candidate. Part of her role was to say whatever Trump wanted or would have liked to hear, and she did exactly that, every time, with a huge smile on her face.

When I’d read this speech on paper, it didn’t sound as dark and menacing as it did when he delivered it. He was speaking to his cult—not the country.

What disturbed me the most about the Manafort situation was the lack of vetting. This was a major party presidential campaign, and it seemed like no one was being sufficiently legally checked out before being put in leadership roles. This would come back to bite us again and again.

It became immediately apparent that Trump lacked basic comprehension about the very complicated relationship between the United States, the former Soviet Union, and modern Russia. History didn’t seem to matter to him. Donald was not a student of history.

Trump just shook his head and said, “Look at what he did now. He screwed up again. What a f**kup.”

Apparently, RNC chairman Reince Priebus wanted Trump to bow out of the race, but Steve Bannon would not hear of it. Lara was fielding panicked texts from all of us, but she said, “I know this is bad, but we have a plan.”

He simply couldn’t admit that he’d done anything wrong and he had no empathy for anyone he’d offended, because he had no empathy for anyone, period. Donald Trump’s single greatest character flaw as a leader and human being is his complete and total lack of empathy.

She also said she did not know my name, despite my name appearing on a giant red sign right over my head.

“Now would be a good time to resign and condemn Trump’s behavior. This isn’t about your public reputation. This is about a man and the spirit of hostility towards African Americans.”

Comey’s letter was like a death blow to Hillary’s campaign. Without that letter, she might have won.

There was also some hedging on his behalf. In a tweet, he wrote, “If they win, it’s because they cheated.”

Most of the loyal soldiers, like Michael Cohen, would never say die.

where I could just take a break and think. In the end, we achieved our goal. The exit polling showed that we received 8 percent of the black vote, beating Romney’s 6 percent by two points. Thirteen percent of African American men voted for Trump, and I think that goes back to his aspirational image,

Lara call to check on me. “Hey. We’re just calling to see if you’re okay!” she said. I was back with John by then, and everything was much, much better. I thanked her for asking, and assured her that I was fine. I didn’t want Trump to think that the stress of what we’d been through had gotten to me. Donald hates weakness.

The irony is, Trump himself has greatly inflated his own wealth. He has said that he graduated in the top of his class, which has been proven to be untrue. Trump is the one who has the sketchy bio, and he overcompensates for it by attacking Obama to feed his base.

The clock was ticking, and unfortunately for everyone on the Trump train, we were moving at a crawl.

Trump demands loyalty. He can’t work closely with people who have shown any sign of weakness or doubt.

People in the room at the time said that Donald was defiant, looked Reince in the face, and said, “I’m not dropping out. I’m going to win.”

As usual in Trumpworld, there was little to no diversity;

If I didn’t go back to DC and be part of Trump’s White House, what other black woman in Trump’s orbit would?

When he and Ivanka first started dating, I asked Donald what he thought of Jared. “He seems a little sweet to me,” he said, using his phrasing for “gay.”)

If Hillary Clinton had won, she would have brought in her eight-hundred-member campaign staff, along with people who’d worked in her husband’s administration, and coasted right through the transition. We had only 130. She’d been through a transition before and knew exactly what it entailed. To put it bluntly, we hadn’t and didn’t.

His candidates had to present themselves to him at Bedminster, his golf course in New Jersey; Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach; or Trump Tower in Manhattan, and walk before a spray of photographers—like the Miss USA beauty pageant runway—for their audience with King Trump.

If he becomes president of the United States, in eight years, I’m running!”

The fallout from his January 2017 visit to Trump Tower was immediate and far-reaching. His viewership took a severe hit, and he stated on his radio show, “Meeting with Trump was the worst mistake of my life.”

All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad!” I was livid and called him to ask him, “Why are you doing this? John Lewis is one of the most respected men in America. Not to mention a civil rights icon! You have to stop this!” “He took the first shot,” said Donald. “If he hits me, I hit back.”

“Omarosa, what do you think about me getting sworn in on The Art of the Deal?” I said, “Instead of the Bible?”

Since the Bible has little significance to him, it might have felt disingenuous to him to take an oath on it. But The Art of the Deal meant a lot to him. Nothing has more meaning to Donald than himself.

But I could not stop myself from contemplating whether her position as his spiritual advisor had ever been missionary.

Trump did not receive the majority of the popular vote, and the victory was tainted by that and Russia interference doubts.

We’d asked him to be “more presidential,” and signing EOs was one way to do it. However, it might as well have been a doodle scribbled on a notepad without the people and logistics in place to implement it. Later,

There was even talk of charging people to attend.

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.”

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

But he couldn’t remember the key points and stumbled over large words, which we scratched out and replaced with simpler terms. The change in him since his prime was dramatic.

For this particular speech, I begged him not to say, “What do we have to lose?” or to refer to the participants as “you people” as he had during the campaign’s ministers’ meeting. “You people is pejorative,” I explained to him. He looked puzzled. I said, “It’s bad. Just don’t say it. Ever.” When he practiced the opener, he spoke only in fragments, not complete sentences. When I tried to correct him, he became frustrated and more irritable.

The cover line read, “The Great Manipulator.” Donald lost his mind over this cover. He raged at Bannon at high volume in a room full of people, yelling, “He thinks he’s a manipulator?

His fury was from the cover alone, since he didn’t read the article.

He didn’t remember, drew a blank. I

I suspected that Pence was just biding his time, looking the part of the perfect VP, until Trump resigned, was impeached, or served his term.

Although Craig Melvin had submitted topics in advance, Donald didn’t stick to the script, again.

This time I’d been tackled by my own teammate at the one-yard line.