“It was amazing. I can’t believe my mentor, my friend is now president of the United States!” I told them. I looked exhausted. I did not care. I was overjoyed.
After several hours’ rest, I got up the next day, showered, dressed, and headed back to Trump Tower for a 10:00 a.m. meeting with senior staff. I was also planning on stopping in to congratulate the president-elect. As I entered the lobby of that building on 725 Fifth Avenue, where it all began for me, I realized I’d come full circle. Thirteen years ago, I’d walked into the same building for the first time with my suitcase, a game plan, and the determination to win. Now I was walking in again, taking the same elevator to the same floor to wait in the same lobby area before going in to see now–President Elect Trump.
No one could make this story up.
Believe it or not, we worked all day on November 9. By the time I headed back to my hotel, protesters had swarmed Midtown and surrounded Trump Tower. Katrina and I were sharing a car from the Fox studios, and when we reached the spot where they’d have to go out of their way to take me to the hotel entrance, I said that I’d just get out and walk. I love to walk, and I was still full of energy. A nice little stroll for six blocks to Trump International along Central Park South seemed ideal.
“Are you sure?” she said. “You need to be careful, it’s dangerous out there.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
Traffic was at a standstill. Now I saw why: protesters had shut down Columbus Circle. As I was getting closer, I got a sense of how many there were. There had to be at least a few thousand.
I wasn’t concerned—I put on a pretty good disguise when I walk and move around. But when I was crushed by the crowd and had to slow down, I started to get very nervous someone would take a close look at me. I kept thinking, Okay, just focus on getting to the side door. The front door was completely blocked by an angry mob.
All the doormen and hotel staff knew me because I’d stayed there for months. They would let me in the loading-dock entrance. As I was walking down a side street, I realized that the protesters had also figured out that there was an alternate entrance to block and had shifted their attention.
I just kept walking, and made it within a few feet of the door.
A man yelled out, “There’s Omarosa! That sellout! Let’s get her!”
They started rushing toward me. A Trump security guard was standing there, and, with perfect timing, he opened the door, grabbed me, threw me inside, and shut the door behind me, locking it.
It was just like that time my mother grabbed my sister and me away from that drug dealer and shooting cop back in the playground at Westlake Terrace.
Shaking, I went up to my room and turned on the TV, and was shocked by what I was seeing. The aerial footage showed blocks and blocks of people. News reports estimated ten thousand protesters, with filmmaker and activist Michael Moore leading the charge.
It was terrifying. So quickly, the feeling of victory descended into despair because of the images I was seeing. I was not thinking, Wow, so many people are unhappy with the election results. Sorry. I was thinking, I don’t want to die over an election!
The next day, Trump Tower was under siege. It was impossible to enter the building. When I called in about my final meeting with DJT, I was dissuaded because it was deemed not safe. As always, I was not deterred by danger, and headed to Trump Tower anyway. I wanted that final talk with him before I flew home. The protests were escalating, a rolling anger that increased with every turn. A snowball effect of unrest.
My fiancé, John, had said on the phone the night before, “You need to leave New York. It’s just not safe.”
I was highly recognizable, associated with Trump, images of me with the president-elect seared in people’s minds. I knew that the vast majority of the protesters were there to make a point. But some of them were violent. They had rushed at me last night, and said, “Let’s get her!” (I assumed they weren’t looking for a selfie or my autograph.)
That’s it, I thought. I’m leaving New York.
That morning, November 10, the hotel people helped pack up my suite and helped me into a waiting SUV. I drove to Trump Tower, where they had security get me into that building. I made it to my meeting with Trump. He said, “You’re coming to the White House with me, right? I have a beautiful new hotel there. The Trump International.”
I knew all about it. I said, “It’ll be interesting to go back to the White House.”
“It’s going to be so much better than your last time. My White House is going to be great, the best. Hey, Omarosa, I want to give you something.” He pulled out a box of Trump ties. “Give these to your fiancé. He’ll love them.”
I thanked him for his gift.
Before I went to the airport to meet my fiancé, John, I sat down for an interview with 20/20. I was emotionally exhausted. I didn’t hold back.
“I was called every single racial slur in the book that you could direct towards an African American by African Americans. I got death threats,” I said. “There are people who stopped talking to me,” I said. “It has been a long, lonely time. . . . I will never forget the people who turned their backs on me when all I was trying to do was help the black community. It’s been so incredibly hard.”
Most people get a chance to process their intense emotions in private, with a friend or family member or a therapist. I didn’t have a chance. I’d been running on pure adrenaline for months. I feared for my safety. When I started talking on that interview, my emotions and vulnerability just came out.
I took pride in showing only a pulled-together, grace-under-pressure persona on TV. That all went out the window.
I didn’t have much time to process that once the interview concluded, either. I had to rush to the airport to catch the last flight out of LaGuardia to Jacksonville, where John was waiting.
The day the 20/20 segment aired, I got a hundred calls and texts from people who said, “I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t think I abandoned you. I didn’t know you were so lonely; I didn’t know you were suffering. You are always so strong.”
If I get hurt, if somebody cuts me, I bleed. I’m human, like everyone else. I’d been so isolated since I joined the campaign. It was the silence that hurt the most. Lifelong friends stopped talking to me and stopped inviting me to things. It had just gotten so bad, and then it all came pouring out live on national TV.
Donald was in DC meeting with Barack Obama. Even though he was very busy, of course, he was consuming the news. He saw 20/20 and had 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 election was over, and now it was time to assemble a team and lead the nation. I was excited to play a big part in that.
Part Three
* * *
The White House
Chapter Ten
* * *
The Transition
“Firings and Discord Put Trump Transition Team in a State of Disarray,” The New York Times, November 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s first order of business as president-elect was to travel to Washington, DC, and meet with President Obama at the White House to discuss the successful transfer of power. According to the official line on the ninety-minute meeting, it went well. Trump said afterward, “I have great respect [for Obama]. We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful, and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel.” It was theorized in the press that, since Trump had never worked in government before, he’d rely on Obama for guidance during the transition and beyond.
It was the last time the two men ever discussed anything of substance.
This comes as no surprise to me. Donald has told me that he thinks Obama is a fraud.
He questioned his nationality, his citizenship, his scholarship. He’s demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate, his passport, and his Harvard transcripts. In 2011, Trump told the Associated Press, “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”
When I would challenge Trump on his erroneous assessment of President Obama, he would say, “Omarosa, you only support him because he’s black! And he hasn’t done anything for the black community, look at his Chicago—it’s a mess, his people are dying and he does nothing!” In Trump’s mind, Obama made up his credentials as a community organizer, and this became a common rant starting in 2007 and continuing to this day. “He’s a fraud. A phoney! Organizer? What is that? They hyped him up and made him out to be some big shot, and he’s not,” he’s said many, many times, over and over, for years. I believe Donald Trump was incapable of believing a black man could be all that Barack Obama is, and he was determined to expose him.
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.
After the election, the Trump team was fully aware that the election had been contentious, to say the least, and that half the electorate was still reeling from the results. A smooth transition from the Obama administration to Trump’s could go a long way to calming down the jittery public. Between Election Day on November 8 and the inauguration on January 20, there were only seventy-three days to form an entire government. The clock was ticking, and unfortunately for everyone on the Trump train, we were moving at a crawl.
The presidential transition, mandated by law, is a critical time for any incoming administration. It sets the tone for the years to come, in style and in staffing. When Obama took over from George W. Bush, his transition was praised for being seamless, upholding his “no drama Obama” reputation.
Trump’s transition was chaotic from day one. Governor Chris Christie, tapped to lead the transition during the course of the campaign, was fired on November 11, and most of Christie’s loyalists were purged. The driving force behind Christie’s ousting was Jared. He hadn’t forgotten that Christie, as New Jersey’s US attorney, prosecuted Jared’s father, Charles, for tax evasion in 2004. VP-elect Mike Pence took over the transition chairmanship with an enormous job to do and precious little time. Not only did the incoming administration have four thousand jobs to fill, from high-level cabinet and cabinet-equivalent posts to the rank-and-file posts known as Schedule C, they had to review existing agencies, set policy agendas, ensure that day-to-day operations continued to function, and divest from businesses that would be a conflict of interest—no small matter for Trump.
One of the first orders of business was for President-elect Trump to appoint a chief of staff. On November 13, Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, was tapped for the role. Paul Ryan and some other GOP players behind the scenes had pressured Trump to appoint Reince, arguing that he’d help bring the Republican establishment into line. Trump would have preferred one of his own people—Jared Kushner, deputy campaign manager David Bossie, or Corey Lewandowski—but Ryan pushed back on the loyal followers’ inexperience. From the beginning, the GOP was putting up safety guardrails so that Donald wouldn’t drive the US government over a cliff.
I liked Reince, but he and Donald were a very bad fit. Trump demands loyalty. He can’t work closely with people who have shown any sign of weakness or doubt. Unfortunately, that was all Donald knew of Reince. When the Access Hollywood story had broken, reportedly Reince and senior advisers met privately with Trump and said, “You have two choices: either you lose by the biggest landslide in presidential election history, or you drop out right now.” 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.” He never let Reince—or anyone for that matter, ever—forget that Reince wanted him to drop out. He would demean Reince and mock that moment of weakness. Reince was starting with two strikes against him. So why did Donald give in to the GOP and Speaker Ryan? He really did want to be a good president and keep his campaign promise. If putting in Reincey (as he nicknamed him) would make peace with the Never Trumpers and the GOP, then it was worth it.
Around this time, immediately after the election, my longtime agent John Seitzer from Agency for the Performing Arts (APA) in Beverly Hills started calling me with offers from several Hollywood producers. The offers ranged from producing my own television projects to opportunities in scripted and unscripted shows, to entertainment and news, to having my own talk show and/or serving as a political correspondent. I also got a call from Robert Walker, my longtime agent at the American Program Bureau, my speakers’ bureau in Boston, saying he wanted to schedule a nationwide speaking tour for me to talk about the election and the Trump presidency. He was optimistic that I could command top fees. Last, my close friend and Hollywood talent manager Tracy Christian called with myriad international offers that she said I should seriously consider. Before joining the executive committee, I’d flown to Los Angeles and took a series of meetings, sat there and listened to their pitches, and told the team I would consider each offer carefully. But upon my return to the hustle and bustle of the transition, nothing that was presented felt as fulfilling as hunkering down with my battle buddies and shaping policy and the direction of the country in the new administration. I could have returned to Hollywood—my comfort zone—to my home, my church, service to the chaplain corps of the California State Military Reserve (CSMR), and to all my friends and family. But Trumpworld needed me and I didn’t want to let them, or the nation, down.
Pence went about assembling transition vice chairmen, loyal Trump people including General Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani—all white men, all controversial figures, and all reviled by Democrats.
He also appointed an executive committee that included venture capitalist Peter Thiel; VIP donor Rebekah Mercer; Reince Priebus; Anthony Scaramucci; Steve Mnuchin; Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump; Jared Kushner—and me. As usual in Trumpworld, there was little to no diversity; I was the only African American woman on the executive committee. I was honored by the appointment to serve among this group of trusted, revered people in Trumpworld, placed on the same level as his children and future cabinet members—but I was worried that the lack of diverse voices might get us started on the wrong track.
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? I was the only one in the unique position to keep Trump accountable for his “What do you have to lose?” campaign promises to people of color. As soon as I officially joined the transition team, I wrote down every promise and commitment Trump had made to black and brown people during the campaign—from Chicago, to Flint, to young black men, to Haiti, to the black church—to fight poverty, to improve public education, to end gang warfare on the streets. I considered it my personal priorities list moving forward.
More controversies came up daily, taking precious time away from the impossible mission of assembling a team to start after inauguration day. Trump requested top security clearance for Jared Kushner, setting off cries of nepotism. (By the way, Donald wasn’t always such a fan of Jared. 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.”) Trump gave the press the slip in New York in order to go out for a steak dinner, causing outrage about his lack of seriousness. While he was taking meetings at Trump Tower with Henry Kissinger and the prime minister of Japan, everyone on the executive committee, through weekly conference calls, was strategizing how to get things done. Simply put, we were scrambling. We were woefully unprepared and overwhelmed, and the clock was ticking. Mike Pence did
n’t seem to know how to get the job done. There was simply too much to do, not enough time, and not much experience among the staff we were selecting, most of whom had never worked in Washington before.
As for Trump, he was riding high. We were in the Presidential Transition Committee (PTC) office and he was in Trump Tower. Whenever he was given reports, they were upbeat only. As far as he knew, everything was fine and we were chugging along. The top advisers would give him a list of tasks—meet with someone or choose a cabinet pick—but he wasn’t involved or aware of just how much there was to do, and how much wasn’t getting done.
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. In fact, the transition office was decorated in a way that assumed that Hillary, not Trump, would win. The spouse suite was done up in masculine colors and the presidential offices were feminine colors. Melania took one look at that office space and relocated to working out of the Presidential Suite at the Trump hotel in DC. We also noticed that there were more than nine hundred work spaces—more than enough room to accommodate the voluminous Clinton campaign team.
For a while, we spun our wheels, and then, on November 18, Congress left for Thanksgiving break, and we were stalled again. I was commuting between Trump Tower in New York for meetings, the transition offices in DC, and Jacksonville, Florida, where I was also planning my upcoming nuptials. I was exhausted from travel and the uphill battle of filling some of those four thousand empty seats with diverse, qualified people—a nearly impossible task. I frequented the fifth floor, where the presidential personnel offices were located, asking daily for an update on printouts of diverse applicants from our database. The applications trickled in, but many were fraudulent submissions and profiles or had an insulting message in the body of the résumé.
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 16