I said, “Well, I can make simple talking points for him, but we’ve got to counterpunch. She’s kicking his butt on race issues.” He never bothered to get up to speed on any of it.
One more thing about that first debate: the woman problem came up again, and Hillary mocked Trump’s love of “hanging around” beauty contests and how he’d called Miss Universe 1996 Alicia Machado “Miss Housekeeping” because she’s Latina, and “Miss Piggy” because he thought she was fat. While she was delivering this takedown, Trump interrupted her, which only reinforced her point that Trump was disrespectful and dismissive of women.
When Donald began attacking Machado on Twitter, calling her “disgusting” and “my worst Miss U” in addition to saying she had a “sex tape” and questioning her citizenship, I groaned. His woman problem might not have a solution—no matter how many stops we made on the Women for Trump bus.
OCTOBER 7
* * *
Donald Trump told CNN, “[The Central Park 5] admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.” The young men—four black and one of Hispanic descent—who were arrested and convicted for the vicious 1989 crime spent between six and thirteen years in prison. Years later, when another man confessed to the crime, DNA evidence proved their innocence. They were exonerated in 2014 and were paid a $41 million settlement from New York for their wrongful conviction.
Hope Hicks and I emailed about talking points. I wrote, “Even though it’s old news, this story, his response, has legs. I’m concerned it will be brought up in the debate and in any press that he does, in attack ads in battleground states.” This was going to hurt us badly with African American voters. It was just like his birther claims that stretched out over years.
I spoke with him about it myself. I prepared a briefing about the case. I asked him to look at the available information and to come to terms with the fact that they were indeed innocent. He rambled, rehashing his misinformation and refusing to look at anything new about the psychology of innocent people confessing under duress. For him, it was black and white (no pun intended). They confessed, so they were guilty. His mind was like a brick wall. He refused to take back his words or admit he was wrong.
I told him that his stubbornness and ignorant position were irrational and hurting us, but he refused to budge, which put me on the front lines on the issue. I was constantly in fight mode, fighting to correct him on these crucial issues.
This is the big one, I thought. This is as bad as it’s going to get. Boy, was I wrong.
4:00 p.m.
The Washington Post put up a video on its website that has become known the world over as the Access Hollywood tape.
I was at an airport, on my way home to LA, when the news broke. The text chain with the Women for Trump group was full of swear words, anguish, and disbelief. Watching that footage was the most shocking moment of my life with Donald Trump. I can only describe it as a punch in the stomach. I knew all those people on the bus: Billy Bush, Jim Dowd, Keith Schiller. I’d heard Trump speak crassly before, on The Apprentice. I’d heard him talk about women as objects of beauty before. But I’d never heard anything like that. It struck me the same way it struck everyone else: the man is bragging about a sexual assault. But because of my blind spot, or my history with him, or just because I couldn’t emotionally allow myself to believe it, I tried to rationalize it, thinking, It’s offensive, but he says offensive things. It’s normal for him. He wouldn’t assault a woman. He loves women! He’s just trying to impress the guys on the bus.
5:30 p.m.
Hillary’s campaign tweeted, “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.” She was roundly mocked on social media. One person commented, “Your husband got a blowjob from an intern and used a cigar as a dildo. And this is horrific?”
Throughout the afternoon, I was receiving texts from the campaign. Lara was giving us updates on the back-and-forth behind the scenes. 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.”
11:00 p.m.
When in crisis, the unofficial Trump family strategy was to go dark for twenty-four hours. But this time, Trump released a video statement after only seven hours, the famous “locker-room talk” sorry-not-sorry apology. The strategy was conceived by Bannon, Jared, and Kellyanne.
This was the big plan? People wanted him to express shame, but he refused to do that. 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.
Not too long after the video was released, Melania told Anderson Cooper, in what was, for me, an excruciating video to watch, that she accepted her husband’s apology. I could not help but think about Hillary Clinton when all this was happening. Melania, like Hillary, had an unfaithful husband exposed in a very public space. Melania carried it differently, though, like a woman who was fully aware of who her husband was and what she’d gotten into by marrying him. Remember, Donald met her at a club while he was with another woman and not yet divorced from Marla Maples. I don’t think that Melania ever had an expectation that Donald was going to be faithful. Not that I thought she condoned the Access Hollywood content.
OCTOBER 8
* * *
In the morning, I went to the church of my friend, the head of the Saint Louis NAACP, because I needed Jesus. We all did at that point.
At 2:44, Bill Pruitt, a producer from the early Apprentice seasons, tweeted, “As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng” [sic]
The comms team called me to see if I knew anything about what Bill was talking about.
Over the day, people speculated what could be on these #trumptapes, and the N-word was mentioned often.
7:00 p.m.
Trump had a press conference with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Kathy Shelton, and Paula Jones, all of Bill Clinton’s accusers, less than two hours before the second presidential debate in Saint Louis. It was classic Trump tactics, to discredit and distract. I have no idea if it worked, but it did send the message that he would keep swinging.
Clinton’s accusers sat in the family box, along with all the women who had forgiven and stayed loyal to Trump: Melania, Ivanka, Lara, and Vanessa. Me. I hoped Melania was okay. In her Anderson Cooper interview, she’d looked shell-shocked.
Don’t ask me to parse the debate. I barely heard a word of it.
In the spin room afterward, I was surrounded by a throng of reporters who wanted to get my reaction to the Access Hollywood tape and the debate antics of the campaign. In the middle of this very hectic scene, a young woman started yelling at me, “I was sexually assaulted! I was raped!” Who is she? I wondered. Is she a journalist? How did she get in here? I was in the middle of answering reporters’ questions about Trump’s debate performance, but she kept yelling at me.
I said, “I’m sorry about what happened to you, but I didn’t do that to you.” I urged her to seek help and got back to work.
The next thing I knew, there’s a viral video shot by a reporter of this woman in the bathroom crying, saying that she had hoped to speak to a Trump surrogate about rape culture and Trump’s permissive attitude about sexual assault, as a survivor, and that the woman she tried to engage, “an African American,” had been insensitive and insulting to her. She also said she did not know my name, despite my name appearing on a giant red sign right over my head.
I am convinced it was a staged stunt, that she was a plant. Why was she in the spin room, screaming, “I was raped”?
And why, if she was so upset, did she then run into the bathroom and tell a reporter that I was mean to her? And why wasn’t that reporter in the spin room, getting a real story? Trump was about to come out. Didn’t she want to ask him about this issue? Did this smell right to anyone?
The “student” posted on Twitter about the incident, an account that appeared to have been created for this purpose and never used again. She had only two followers. I unleashed on Twitter about what I thought was an obvious setup. I’d been on edge, as you can imagine, and this put me over the top. I must have written half a dozen tweets about how staged I believed this was, which only made the story bigger.
OCTOBER 9
* * *
All day, I was getting texts and emails from people I knew asking why I hadn’t already packed my bags and gotten the hell out of there. Lester McCorn, my classmate from seminary, texted, “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.”
On social media, people had ideas whom the slur on the Apprentice tapes was referring to. A sample tweet: “Trump probably was calling Omarosa a n***er in those #apprenticetapes, I would not be surprised.”
My mother checked in on me often. “I’m worried about you. I want to make sure you’re okay,” she said. She knew that I would do what I wanted and needed to do, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. I’d heard them all out, but I’d make up my own mind. She was concerned, but she knew she had raised a daring child.
The MAGA messaging email of the day covered a lot of ground, avoiding an apology and relying on tried-and-true tactics. The points made, and selected quotes from the memo are as follows:
Despite his comments about women, we were to say, “Mr. Trump has the utmost respect for all of the women in his life—his wife, daughters, the women he has promoted throughout his businesses, and the millions of women who support him as the agent of change this country needs.” It pushed our mentioning that if Melania accepted her husband’s apology, so should everyone else.
Whenever someone mentioned Access Hollywood, we were to say, “Mr. Trump’s words pale in comparison to the words and, vitally, tragic actions of Hillary Clinton. She has called tens of millions of Americans desperate, deplorable, irredeemable people who live in their parents’ basement.” No matter what, pivot to key words and phrases including, but not limited to: “Benghazi,” “emails,” “private server,” “Hillary Clinton bullied and smeared Bill Clinton’s accusers,” “Hillary dreams of open borders,” “Hillary Clinton has swanky fundraisers with her Wall Street buddies.”
Regarding the debate, we were to say that Hillary Clinton was “robotic,” “scripted,” “out of touch,” and evasive about emails. On the contrary, we were to praise Trump’s “wild success as a businessman, problem solver, and change agent.” The catchphrase would be, “Mr. Trump will once again show himself to be the strong, focused, energetic leader we need” to Make America Great Again.
OCTOBER 11
* * *
On a conference call with Katrina, Lynne, and myself, we discussed all the information we’d gathered about the tape that Bill Pruitt had referred to. Lynne was familiar with Bill from The Apprentice days, too. Katrina had heard from her sources that the tape was of Trump using the N-word. Someone she knew, who knew political strategist Frank Luntz, told her that Luntz had heard it.
Lynne reported that she asked Trump about it on the plane, specifically whether it was possible that such a tape might exist, and he said “no.” Then, she asked him what he wanted her to do, and he said, “Put it to bed.”
Katrina cursed and said, “He said it.”
In survival mode, I could only ask, “Oh, no! What do we do?” I was hoping it could not be true, but it probably was. I didn’t know what to believe. If he’d said it during that time, he might have said it about me. The thought was too awful to contemplate. I pushed it aside. I was very good at doing that by this point.
Jason Miller was conferenced into the call, and we all discussed next steps. What struck me was that no one seemed shocked. No one said, “He’d never say that.” He was such a loose cannon and there was no way of knowing what he had or hadn’t said thirteen years ago.
OCTOBER 14
* * *
We were back in North Carolina, where the Women for Trump tour had started, with Lara, Katrina, Lynne, Diamond, and Silk, in a bus with Trump’s face plastered on the side. We made a stop to give out bottles of water and boxes of food and diapers for hurricane relief. I was there in body, and put on a good show, but my spirit was lagging.
I stayed with Trump out of loyalty. I had been brought on to the campaign to deal with the ever-growing woman problem, and I could not abandon him now. The Access Hollywood tape had been spun internally as a dirty trick by the Clinton campaign, a strategic move. Why release the tape now? Why not back in July after the convention? It wasn’t just to win the election, it was to humiliate and destroy a family, to steal an election.
The other part of it was that, after a brief dip, Trump’s poll numbers were unchanged. His voters—men and women—didn’t care what he said on that bus. We still had a chance to win, despite every major newspaper forecasting for a huge Clinton victory.
OCTOBER 15
* * *
Saturday Night Live spoofed Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” with the parody video “Melaniade,” staring Emily Blunt as Ivanka, Cecily Strong as Melania, Vanessa Bayer as Tiffany, Kate McKinnon as Kellyanne, and Sasheer Zamata as yours truly, Trump’s “one black friend.” It showed a scene where my character walks in and tenders her resignation by slamming down a paper that reads, “I quit,” signed Omarosa.
It was frankly hilarious.
As a huge Beyoncé fan, I laughed and danced while watching the episode live on TV. It was a much needed and appreciated dose of humor.
OCTOBER 19
* * *
The campaign traveled to Las Vegas for the third debate, moderated by Fox anchor Chris Wallace. The format allowed the candidate to move around the stage, and Trump’s prep team instructed him to take advantage of the space, to use his large physical presence to dominate it.
As you recall, he took it a little too far by looming directly behind Hillary while she was speaking. He hadn’t been instructed to be stalkerish, but his efforts to be physically intimidating had that effect. But the point is, every last detail of that debate was discussed and decided upon in the war room. I’d come around to seeing the Access Hollywood tape, and the possible Apprentice tape, as weapons used against us by the opposition. They weren’t evidence of Trump’s vulgarity and boorishness. As Melania and Ivanka had said in their response to the tape, what they heard did not match the man I knew.
Our internal data, tracked by our numbers guru Brad Parscale, showed that Trump was holding steady in battleground states. He had an office at headquarters, and a staff. One young woman I always said hello to was named Laura Hilger. She was the head of research for a firm called Cambridge Analytica. Yup, that Cambridge Analytica: the UK firm that harvested Facebook data to influence the election.
In a few days, I caught the Washington Post headline: “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Are Approaching Zero.” I felt sick.
OCTOBER 27
* * *
Surprise! FBI director James Comey announced that they were reopening the investigation into Hillary’s emails. As he wrote in his famous letter, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent. . . . I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
Basically, he was just saying they were looking at some emails, but didn’t know if they had anything. Later, it was revealed that the potentially questionable communications were bet
ween Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Anthony Weiner.
Trumpworld was thrilled with the move, naturally. If the Access Hollywood tape was NBC’s attempt to kill us, Comey’s letter was like a death blow to Hillary’s campaign.
Without that letter, she might have won.
Internally, we were delighted and relieved. We weren’t popping the champagne, but it felt like a cause for celebration. For how to handle it publicly, we huddled and came up with the strategy of resolve. We were told not to gloat. The talker guidelines were to hammer it home, to pivot toward Comey and the emails. No matter what we were talking about—say, education or the economy—always shift to the reopened investigation. Little did we know, the FBI was investigating our campaign at that point, too. If that news had gotten out during the campaign, it might’ve neutralized the Clinton situation. But it didn’t.
OCTOBER 31
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 14