Omarosa’s Book: 20 Explosive Revelations From ‘Unhinged’

Omarosa Manigault Newman’s insider tell-all of her time in the White House has not lacked for media coverage, which has focused mostly on her explosive claims that Donald Trump is an unabashed racist who has uttered racial slurs — including calling Kellyanne Conway’s half-Filipino husband a “fucking flip” and “goo-goo,” and referring to African-Americans as the n-word in a tape recorded on the set of NBC’s The Apprentice. Also making headlines is her claim that Trump expressed an interest in being sworn in at his inauguration on a copy of The Art of the Deal, his best-selling book. 

But there is more — much more, in fact. The Hollywood Reporter has read Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House and found 20 more allegations worth highlighting. Some — like the fact that Stephen Miller was the architect of the administration’s plot to separate asylum-seeking migrants from their children — conform with previous reports. Others, however, have never been reported before.

1. Manigault Newman first met Trump in 2003 on the set of The Apprentice, where she beat out — according to Trump — 215,000 applicants to get cast on the show. “Whenever there was a disagreement or an argument, his eyes lit up,” she writes on page 29. “He loved conflict, chaos, and confusion.” What unfolded in the boardroom, however, wasn’t always what ended up on TV.

Page 31: “A sanitized version appeared on TV, but the outtakes … were not appropriate for a family show. Trump asked personal questions of the female contestants, like ‘What do you think she’s like in bed?’ … Then he turned to the male contestants and asked, ‘Who do you think would be better in bed between the two of them?'”

Page 44: “Candidate Gene Simmons of KISS, a close friend of Donald’s, was the most disgusting misogynist I had ever met. … During one long break, Donald asked Gene, ‘What do you think of Ivanka? How’s she doing?’ What followed was a vile exchange, right in front of Ivanka, with Gene Simmons talking about her in a room full of people. While leering openly at her breasts, he said, ‘She’s a very, very sexy, desirable young woman who I’m looking forward to getting to know much better if you know what I mean, with all due respect.’ Her father egged him on.”

Page 46: “During boardroom outtakes, Donald talked about Obama often. He hated him. He never explained why, but now I believe it was because Obama was black.”

2. After joining the Trump campaign in summer 2016 as its director of African-American outreach, Manigault Newman was quickly brought up to speed on Team Trump’s strategies.

Page 101: “I called our number one campaign strategy ‘whataboutism.’ In all of our talking-point memos and emails, we were instructed to bring up her emails. No matter what a reporter asked us, we pivoted to that. It was the only thing we had. At that point, we lacked a platform, plans, big ideas about foreign or domestic policy. All we had was Trump’s bluster, the MAGA slogan, and Hillary’s emails.”

Page 118: “Our job was to turn his tweets [into] targeted messaging. The Trump Tweet Alert memo came with specific talking points to reason to whatever he posted in the wee hours. The writer of the talking points depended on the subject matter of Trump’s tweet. If Trump posted about domestic policy, the expert in that field would write them. … Every adviser to the campaign was enlisted to contribute.”

3. At the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland, on July 21, 2016, Manigault Newman recalls being repulsed by the way Trump touched his daughter onstage after her speech. 

Page 126: “Ivanka Trump walked out to the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ and gave her MAGA-power speech. … The nominee walked onstage from the wings, went over to his daughter, … placed his hands low on her hips while appraising her, and then patted her on her hip. The placement of his hands made everyone uncomfortable. … It appeared to me that Ivanka had gotten so used to his touching her in ways that made others cringe and either didn’t notice it anymore or purposefully allowed it to happen — as I’ve said, Ivanka uses his obsession with her to her advantage.”

4. Trump once suggested Jared Kushner, his future son-in-law, is gay.

Page 178: “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.'”

5. Manigault Newman approached former chief strategist Steve Bannon at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 15, 2017.

Page 184: “I had an interesting conversation with Steve Bannon and asked him if the rumors of his being a racist were true. He said no. He explained, ‘The same way you are a proud African-American woman, I am a proud white man. What’s the difference between my pride and your pride?’ he asked. I said, ‘Hate defines white supremacy.'”

6. After the inauguration, Manigault Newman describes an administration in complete disarray, wholly incapable of filling the 4,000 positions Trump needed to fill. No one was expecting a Trump presidency, including the White House decorators.

Page 179: “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 suites of the Trump Hotel in D.C. We also [noticed] that there were more than nine hundred workspaces — enough room to accommodate the voluminous Clinton campaign team. … We had only 130.”

7. One of his first moves as president was to enact the infamous travel ban on citizens from seven mostly Muslim nations. During discussions over this executive order, adviser Stephen Miller floated a policy he would use later.

Page 215: “Trump had signed an executive order to ban people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. … In a senior staff meeting around this time, 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.”

8. After a few weeks in office, Manigault Newman told the president she planned to take a diplomatic trip to Haiti.

Page 220: “On day seventeen, I convinced Reince [Preibus] to allow me to work with the Department of State to take a delegation to Haiti for the inauguration of Jovenel Moise. When I told DJT that I would be gone for a couple of days, he asked me, ‘Why did you choose that shitty country as your first foreign trip? … You should have gone to Scotland and played golf at [his course] Turnberry.'”

9. Early on, she noted that Mike Pence and his staffers were doing a bad job of hiding their true intentions.

Pages 221, 325: “The first thing I noticed was that people on Pence’s staff kept slipping up and calling him president. I heard people saying things like, ‘When we’re in charge … ,’ or, ‘Once you become president … .’ I asked him explicitly if he had any ambitions for the highest office when Donald completed his two terms. Pence said, ‘Two terms? You think two terms?’ … He and his team are simply biding their time until Trump is impeached or resigns.”

10. An impression of Ivanka Trump on Saturday Night Live by Scarlett Johansson did not sit well with the first daughter and adviser to the president.

Page 232: “On day fifty-one, Saturday Night Live skewered Trump with expert precision in an advertising parody with Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka selling a fragrance called Complicit. … We’d all been hit, many of us in that same week’s show. But Ivanka would not stop talking about being ripped. Like her father, Ivanka was thin-skinned and could not seem to take a joke.”

11. Anyone in the core White House staff has quick and easy access to powerful prescription drugs.

Page 242: “Throughout my time in the White House, as a part of a little-known program called the executive medical program, the cabinet and all [top-ranking assistants to the president] could get a prescription for any ailment. They would give out anything, right from the bottle, no prescription needed. Say your back was hurting. You’d go in and complain, and walk out with a month’s supply of powerful pain medication.”

12. Trump had little remorse for shoving a world leader aside to get into the center of a NATO photo.

Page 251: “Trump went to a NATO summit in Brussels and shoved Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, out of the way so he would be standing in the center of the group photo. … I asked him, ‘You came off a little aggressive. Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s just a whiny punk bitch.'”

13. Similarly, his son Donald Trump Jr. earned his scorn, often in front of other people.

Page 263: “On July 11, Don Jr. released the email chain about his meeting in Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer. When I saw Donald that day, I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about Don.’ He said, ‘He is such a fuck-up. He screwed up again, but this time, he’s screwing us all, big-time!'”

14. If you dine on Air Force One, you get billed for your meal.

Page 271: “Even though the flight was only an hour, they served a meal, the menu printed and leather bound. (FYI: If you fly on Air Force One, you will be invoiced for the meal whether you eat it or not.)”

15. On July 31, 2017, Trump fired Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director after one week on the job. Scaramucci did not take the news well.

Page 273: “Anthony walked out, made a left by the chief of staff’s office where all the assistants sat, stepped into a little cubby-like office, and started crying. One of the assistants saw and heard the whole thing. She described it as ‘a girly cry.'”

16. Manigault Newman noticed Trump of 2017 was a far cry from the sharp-minded businessman she knew in 2003. 

Page 278: “Donald rambled incoherently, speaking in random fragments, veering from thought to thought and topic to topic. … ‘Hey, I’m going to meet about, you know what? This guy’s a good guy. China, the people, look, China is getting us. These guys are no good. But the wall, the wall.’” 

17. The Obama-era plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was shelved by Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, who said he had more important things to focus on. Trump was similarly unenthused.

Page 295: “While flipping through the folder, Trump came to the picture of Tubman, the woman who personally brought more than three hundred slaves to freedom, risking her own life every time, and said to me, ‘You want to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?'”

18. Manigault Newman theorizes Trump’s Diet Coke addiction may be behind his mental impairment — and tried to relay that to him.

Page 312-313: “He’s up to eight cans a day, at least. Eight cans a day, for the last fifteen years, is 43,80 cans of Diet Coke, poured into his system. … I researched it and found a brand-new study by a team of neurologists from Boston University that linked Diet Coke consumption with dementia and increased risk of stroke. … I printed out the study and put it in his stack. He never read it. [Former staff secretary] Rob Porter did, and he gave me a warning.”

19. After her firing by John Kelly in the Situation Room, she received a call from Eric and Lara Trump, who expressed their disappointment at seeing her go and offered her a role on the 2020 re-election campaign. 

Page 321: “Lara sent me a contract to work on the 2020 campaign for $15,000 per month, the same salary that I’d received at the White House. The [nondisclosure agreement] attached to the email was as harsh and restrictive as any I’d seen in all my years of television. … I declined the offer.”

20. Manigault Newman theorizes that Melania Trump’s strange fashion choices — and in particular the “I Don’t Care Do U?” jacket she wore as they traveled to see children ripped from their parents — are no accident.

Page 328: “I believe Melania uses style to punish her husband. She wore that jacket to hurt Trump, setting off a controversy that he would have to fix, prolonging the conversation about the administration’s insensitivity, ruining the trip itself. … She gladly, spitefully wrecked her husband’s directions to make him look foolish. … If Melania were to try to pull the ultimate humiliation and leave him while he’s in office, he would find ways to punish her. … In my opinion, Melania is counting every minute until he is out of office and she can divorce him.”