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

by Omarosa Manigault Newman

  He said, “Oh, he’s just a whiny punk bitch.”

  We’d all been under intense stress for what felt like forever. Around this time, I remember a handful of senior advisers were in the Oval, and Kellyanne excused herself. As soon as she was out of the room, Trump waved his hand under his eyes, and said, “This place is taking a real toll on Kellyanne,” meaning she wasn’t looking good. This was another classic Trump move, to insult or criticize someone’s appearance or manner as soon as they left the room.

  • • •

  AS I MENTIONED, Donald always took it as a personal betrayal when former friends became his enemies. He’d asked me at one point to tell him who I thought the leakers were, and I didn’t miss a beat and started with, “Katie Walsh.”

  Donald said, “I didn’t want her anyway. Reincey brought all these people in from the RNC. All disloyal, ungrateful people.”

  Donald set out to clean house, and he wanted to know who was loyal and who he couldn’t trust. His level of paranoia was at an all-time high.

  Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were people he considered to be backstabbers. When they spoke harshly of him on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, he would often rail, “No loyalty! None!” at the screen.

  “I heard poorly rated @MorningJoe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came . .

  . . . to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

  Trump tweets, June 29, 2017, 5:52 and 5:58 am

  He did watch the show, and was incensed by it. When he tweeted about Psycho Joe and low IQ Crazy Mika’s face-lift, an offensive, sexist tweet to be sure, the president was not taken to task for it by his advisers.

  But I was.

  I was blamed for Trump’s writing those tweets. News accounts accused me of setting him off, but that was just not the case. Early on, during the first one hundred days, he frequently called me and others to “pull up an article” or research and print out something he saw on cable news. He would ask for different news clippings, too. His morning press-briefing folders, prepared by Spicer and his staff, only contained positive news items about Trump. They thought that if he read just the glowing reviews, he wouldn’t tweet something crazy. The strategy made no sense, since he watched TV continuously. Unless he was in a meeting or at an event, he was sitting in his private dining room off the Oval Office, in front of a wall of cable news TV with his ubiquitous Diet Coke and whatever snacks he’d summoned from the kitchen via the button on his desk.

  Donald J. Trump was the president of the United States. If he asked me to print out an article and give it to him, I did it. I was not his nanny or his nurse. Nor was I his secretary or his executive assistant. He knew he could ask those people for paper. But he didn’t want others to know what he was reading or researching, especially if it was gossip. Any paper that goes to the president must pass first to staff secretary Rob Porter or his executive assistant, per the Presidential Records Act, so anything he touched would be documented and archived. In early 2018, some former White House clerical staff described the laborious process of taking shreds of paper Trump tore up—an old habit from his Trump Organization days—and scotch-taping them back together to uphold the Records Act. I guess they didn’t know that he would pocket sensitive notes or that once, after a meeting in the Oval with Michael Cohen, I saw him put a note in his mouth. Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive.

  The Mika and Joe tweets were a bridge too far for the leakers, a.k.a. “multiple sources inside the White House.” They worked the phones and said that it was common practice for certain aides to sneak into the Oval and give the president intentionally distracting and infuriating coverage. I was pointed out as the “worst offender.”

  If that were true, it was because Donald constantly called me directly, or he sent someone to find me and tell me, “The president asked for you to stop over; he wants to ask you something.” I would drop whatever I was doing and do as the president asked.

  I rarely went through the front entrance that you see on The West Wing, with the Marines out front opening the door. There were always camera crews or press monitoring the visitors in and out of the entrance.

  I took the back way, a route most are unaware of. My usual route was a walk from the EEOB, through a corridor, up a flight of stairs to another corridor, make a right by the vice president’s office, walk straight past the chief of staff’s office suite and his many assistants seated in the front room, around a corner by Jared’s and Bannon’s offices and their front rooms of assistants, to the entrance to Donald’s dining room, which connected to the Oval through a private study. I would leave the document on the counter in the small kitchen nook, and then I would dash back to my office.

  Unlike Reince and Sean, who tried to spoon-feed him only positive news I didn’t filter the good from the bad. He trusted me to be truthful, not to try to manipulate him (remember how he had freaked out about that Bannon “the Great Manipulator” Time cover?). Often, he’d reflect to me privately, nostalgically, about the good old days of the small campaign, surrounded by his loyal team—Corey, Hope, Dan, Keith—when anyone could pop into his office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. In the White House, tucked away in his private quarters, with guards every five feet, a huge staff of swamp monsters, leakers, people collecting his trash for an archive, he felt paranoid and distrustful.

  I should have protected myself. But there are no manuals about how to deal with your mentor of nearly fifteen years who becomes the president of the United States. I should have set boundaries, gone through the proper channels. But I believed that Donald would protect me if anything came up. If you made it into his inner circle, he would move heaven and earth to protect you. But there came a point when Donald could not protect me, or himself for that matter.

  • • •

  MY TOP LINE item for the Trump budget was the reinstatement of year-round Pell Grants. Barack Obama’s administration had reduced the benefit to just the fall and spring semesters; during the summer, students were on their own. I went to Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and launched a campaign to get year-round Pell grants reinstated at the cost of $2 billion a year. When the budget was finalized, my request was granted. I’d successfully lobbied for and secured year-round benefits that could help about a million students nationwide, including students at all 101 HBCUs. I am very proud of that. During the same period, I was trying to get a line item budget increase for HBCUs, which had gotten level funding from the previous year. No cuts, no increases.

  When Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, decided to make her first visit to a college, she chose my alma mater Howard University. I was happy to accompany her to the campus, where I’d gotten my master’s and worked on my doctorate, to meet with the HU president Wayne Fredrick. I was eager to show her around the “mecca.”

  After the meeting news spread on campus, students protested. They did not want her there, and called for the firing of the Howard president for even meeting with her. Earlier in the year, she’d visited Jefferson Middle School Academy in DC, and was met with protesters who blocked the door briefly. No one wanted DeVos to speak at their school, and her visits were written off as photo ops only.

  But I was on a mission for increased education funding for HBCUs and wasn’t ready to give up on involving the secretary of education in the pursuit. On May 10, DeVos and I went to the graduation ceremony at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida.

  Betsy got up onstage to give her speech and was immediately, loudly booed by the entire audience. Graduating students and their families stood up and turned their backs on her. I was seated onstage watching this travesty unfold. When the booing started, she should have wrapped it up, but she went on and
on for twenty minutes, talking over the booing. I was thinking, It’s not about you! Abandon your full speech! Adjust, woman!

  I love HBCUs so much, and to be on a stage with her to see the entire auditorium of students and parents booing her, in effect, booing Trump and the administration, was painful to experience.

  I asked her later on how she felt about what happened. She said, “I did great!”

  I must have looked stunned.

  She said, “They don’t get it. They don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.” Meaning, all those black students were too stupid to understand her agenda.

  I said, “Oh, no, Madam Secretary. They get it. They get it, and they aren’t happy about you or your goals.”

  She’d issued a statement, saying that HBCUs were a form of school choice. “No, Secretary DeVos,” I explained, “it was not always a choice to go to black colleges. Black students had to attend black colleges because most PWIs [predominately white institutions] did not accept black students as recently as the 1960s.”

  Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools. She believes it would be better for students, but the truth is, it’s about profit. She’s so fixated on her agenda, she can’t give any consideration to building our public schools, providing financing for them, particularly their infrastructure needs. Schools are shutting down in depressed neighborhoods all over the country to be replaced with for-profit schools, eliminating neighborhood cultural centers, forcing kids to travel great distances, with little proof that only charter schools provide a better education. I think that it should be a parental choice. The parents should choose what is best for their children. Not Betsy DeVos.

  The next day, in Florida, she was hosting an event at the Amway Center, and I was instructed to be in the hotel lobby at 8:00. I arrived at 7:52, but Betsy and her motorcade were nowhere to be found. I texted her staff repeatedly to see where everyone had gone. I got a call, and she said, “Sorry, we had to leave early. Change of plans. Take an Uber.”

  I did take an Uber—straight to the airport.

  I was through.

  We’d been booed by the entire auditorium. People were angry. There were protesters. I’d been getting death threats daily. And she’d left me completely alone with no security?

  There is no way she should be the secretary of education. Once I returned and told DJT about what had happened, he shook his head in disgust. He said, “She is Ditzy DeVos, what do you expect? In a very short period of time, I will get rid of her. Believe me, believe me.”

  She is still serving and destroying the education system in this country. The depth and breadth of her ignorance is a travesty for the children.

  In each cabinet meeting, I was seated in the row near her.

  I can tell you, after a year of sitting in those meetings and observing her, that she’s woefully inadequate and not equipped for her job. She is just as horrible as you suspect she is. When she recently visited New York City, she went to several schools, but not a single one that was run by the city. New York has more than one million public school students, but she did not tour one public school. Not one. She does not care about your children. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

  “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” Trump tweet, May 31, 2017, 12:06 a.m.

  The baffling tweets never stopped coming, be they about a ban on transgenders in the military, the Russia witch hunt, Crooked Hillary (still), or fake news. Internally, in my text chains with senior advisers and members of the Trump family, we would react with groans and comments like, “Oh no. Twitter fingers attacks again.” The mysterious “covfefe” tweet was nothing but a typo, we reasoned. He’d meant to write something else and hit “send” by accident. He deleted the tweet, but by then, it was set loose on the world, and the Internet immediately pounced.

  Three hours later, loving the confusion and mystery around his ham-fingered typo, he tweeted, “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!” at 3:09 a.m.

  Now, imagine the president, in his room in the residence, with only his tanning bed for company (Melania sleeps in her own room down the hall), enjoying himself immensely with the chaos and headlines he was creating in the middle of the night about an accidentally sent tweet. He stumped the world with a typo.

  It was more power than one man should have, and definitely not a man who has the soul of an anarchist.

  On June 5, the travel ban, version 2.0, was voted down once again, and Donald tweeted, “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.”

  George Conway, Kellyanne’s husband, a Harvard- and Yale-educated partner at a white-shoe law firm in New York, replied to that tweet with one of his own: “These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.”

  His writing “sad” at the end was particularly zingy. It would not be the last time Conway publicly criticized his wife’s boss.

  Soon after, I was in the Oval with Donald and he picked up an article about George Conway’s counterpunch and ranted, “Would you look at this George Conway article? F**king FLIP! Disloyal! Fucking Goo-goo.”

  I was told later that “Goo-goo” and “FLIP,” an acronym for “f**cking little island people,” are racial slurs for Filipinos. George Conway is half Filipino. I had no idea what he meant when he’d said those words.

  • • •

  BY JUNE I’D given up on Betsy DeVos, and my priority was to get congressional support for HBCUs and overall African American policy priorities by inviting the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to meet with the president—again.

  The first time hadn’t gone well at all. Simply arranging it was controversial. It happened back in March, not long after I’d brought the HBCU presidents to the Oval Office and seen the ensuing memes about Kellyanne Conway with her shoes off, crouched on the couch. The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressman Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, said during a Washington Press Club Foundation dinner that March, “I really just want to know what was going on [in that photo of Kellyanne], . . . because she really looked kind of familiar in that position there.” Meaning, on her knees. He apologized in a statement a few days later.

  In two weeks, Richmond and the executive board of the CBC agreed to meet with Trump, but they refused to sit on the same side of the table or be photographed with him, saying that they would not be used like those HBCU presidents had been. One hour before the meeting, Richmond’s chief of staff delivered a 125-page report in a binder to a junior staffer in domestic policy called “We Have a Lot to Lose”—a reference to Trump’s campaign question to black America, “What do you have to lose?” That staffer didn’t pass the binder to me until ten minutes before the meeting. I had to race to log the document that was addressed to the president to the staff secretary and try to summarize the report. During that March 22 conversation—that included Mike Pence as well as the president—Cedric kept referring to the report, and I had to say, “Excuse me, just to be clear, Congressman Richmond, you just gave us that report less than an hour ago. We have not had adequate time to read it. We don’t know what the contents are. What are your clear demands?”

  Their last-minute submission of the report was a political maneuver designed to undermine the productivity of the meeting. Their strategy up until that point was to boycott, protest, refuse to meet with him and the team, be accusatory and aggressive. That strategy would never work with Donald Trump.

  In mid-June, I sent an invitation and a follow-up letter to all forty-eight CBC members, asking for a meeting at the White House. Although individual members expressed their interest in working with the administration, the chairman declined on behalf of all of them. Cedric Richmond replied by letter: “Based on actions taken by you and your administration since [the March 22 meeting] it appears that our concerns, and you
r stated receptiveness to them, fell on deaf ears.” He listed all the things the Trump administration had failed to do and ways its policies hurt black Americans, including the proposed cuts to Pell Grants and HBCUs, Jeff Sessions’s accelerated war on drugs and the resulting mass incarceration of people of color, and the efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. I was fighting the same battles in the White House myself; I was in agreement with the CBC and nearly all of their list of complaints. But between March 22, our first meeting, and Cedric’s June 21 letter, only three months had passed. Washington moves slowly. The CBC cut us off before we’d had a chance to address their issues.

  Congressman Richmond also objected to my signing my letter to him using my official title “honorable,” the same title given to and used by every AP. The letter had been submitted to the White House correspondence department for approval before being sent, and they added the title. I was required to clear my letters through that department before I sent them out, per White House protocol.

  I was grateful when a few people pointed out that I was attacked for using my rightful title, but when the other white assistants to the president had been addressed as ‘the Honorable . . .’ at a recent state dinner, no one complained. Excellent point!

  The Congressional Black Caucus has not had a meeting with Donald Trump since my departure from the White House. They intend to go four to eight years without meeting with him at all. For the record, the CBC motto is “Black people have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies . . . just permanent interests.” I guess that went out the window with Trump. I would later learn that President Obama also had a difficult relationship with the CBC. So I did not take it personally, even though Richmond had attacked me personally.