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Omarosa Manigault Newman might well be the kind of person you wouldn’t wish on your own worst enemy, unless your own worst enemy just happens to be President of the United States. That, really, is the only conclusion one can draw after reading Omarosa’s book about her time as a Donald Trump surrogate. It’s a strangely readable piece of fractious non-fiction, filled with regret and self-aggrandisement by a woman who was once so driven by ambition that she ignored Trump’s flaws and is now so driven by revenge that she seems blind to her own.
The muttering coming from Washington would have Omarosa as the assassin who will bring down this presidency. You wouldn’t be wise to pin too many hopes on her being that deadly. Her new book claims to be “An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House” but it is also titled “Unhinged” and there’s something definitely a little askew about the lead character.
None of that is to say that Omarosa doesn’t emerge as sympathetic or even likeable. It’s certainly hard not to be touched by her backstory. Omarosa is driven by the tragedies in her life. Her father died after a beating. Her brother would be shot dead by his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Her fiancé, the actor Michael Clarke Duncan, died in 2012 of a heart attack. This life experience generates a frenzied narrative that never seems to settle in any moments of reflection, itself odd given that Omarosa also talks of her path to becoming an ordained Baptist minister.
Hard early years in Youngstown, Ohio, pushed her to seek a life elsewhere. She boasts of how she won a full scholarship for Central State University through volleyball, turning that opportunity into a chance to work in Washington. During the Clinton years, she worked briefly in the White House, in the office of Al Gore. From there she joins the cast of the first series of The Apprentice, where she met the charismatic Donald Trump. Soon she was living in what she calls “Trumpland” and that continued until General John Kelly had her booted out of the White House for reasons that are never made clear.
Omarosa as a writer rarely hesitates when there’s a criticism to be made. She applies the same strategy to the book as she admits she applied to The Apprentice where her catchphrase was “I’m not here to make friends”. The problem is that for all her attempts to tell it as it is, there’s much that’s missing. This is as much apology as it is insight and, as far as this is the central dynamic of the book, it’s not an entirely believable one. The book works too hard to convince us that Omarosa was always on the side of the angels. She tries to convince the reader that she was somehow misjudged given that she had liberal credentials from the beginning, including campaigning for Hillary before Hillary turned her back on her. She goes to some length to convince us that she was always a committed Democrat, including the work she did for Gore. Yet no response is given to the 2017 New York Times article about her time in the White House. But numerous former staff members in that office said that she was pushed out of an entry-level, $25,000-a-year job replying to invitations to Mr. Gore after 13 months, leaving a pile of unanswered correspondence under her desk. “She was the worst hire we ever made,” said Mary Margaret Overbey, Mr. Gore’s former office administrator.
Even more telling is the “cult” narrative that she creates around Trump. Blinded by his success, she failed to see Trump’s true character until it was too late. She asks us to believe that her time in the White House was spent feeling guilty about her work for Trump. She claims to have had great reservations, a gathering concern about Trump’s racism and uses the existence of the “N-Word” tape as a narrative device to keep us reading
This is where the narrative begins to fall apart. We already know much about Omarosa to leave doubts in one’s mind about some of the claims she makes. It’s hard to believe that it took the author so long to understand the reality of a man who, as early as 1973, had been accused of racism. She takes every opportunity to speak of her pride at being the only African American woman on that first series of The Apprentice, of her becoming Director of African-American Outreach for the Trump campaign, and then as “the only African American senior staffer”. She speaks reverentially about Jesse Jackson and about Martin Luther King Jr. Such investment makes it hard to believe she could also be blind to Trump’s actions, especially around Charlottesville and the President’s subsequent press conference
After Charlottesville, Omarosa says that she declined offers to speak on behalf of the President. “I refused to defend the indefensible,” she writes but the admission is shallow and certainly doesn’t explain the subsequent months spent working for him. It underlines the suspicion that there’s some other motive. This, after all, is the same person who infamously said of Donald Trump after his election (a quote that, unsurprisingly, goes unmentioned in the book):
Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump […] It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.
Which Omarosa should we believe? Therein lies the problem. Omarosa is little more than the one-name cipher she deliberately made of herself. The slightly occluded dynamic of the book is that of the insider who is in love with success and, more obviously, power. She happily boasts that she was on the transition’s executive committee alongside such heavy hitters in the world of right-wing politics as “venture capitalist Peter Thiel; VIP donor Rebekah Mercer; Reince Priebus; Anthony Scaramucci; Steve Mnuchin; Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump; Jared Kushner”. Influence clearly matters to Omarosa and that fits the profile she outlines elsewhere of the woman seeking to achieve something or, perhaps, anything. Her prose is littered with tiny acts of anxiety as if she still needs to prove herself. Her energy is really directed to one end: proving herself better if not the best. She explains how her journalism professor “helped me develop my strong writing skills” (note the unnecessary and pushy “strong”) and, at the Emmys, she “dazzled on the red carpet in an orange Fushá gown by Haitian designer Marie Claudinette Pierre Jean, the wife of musician Wyclef Jean” (note the name dropping). The two examples are chosen at random but open any page and you will probably find another example; a single word or phrase which does nothing but affirm Omarosa in her own eyes.
The result is a book that speaks with two voices, out to condemn a world that Omarosa still clearly admires. That, ultimately, where it fails and, perhaps too, where her significance to the Trump story will end. Omarosa is burdened by the reality of what we already knew and what she does very little to address. There is no Damascene conversation beyond the moment she was fired. If Kelly had fired her, one suspects that Omarosa would still be in the White House, pursuing the very same policies she now condemns and excusing the President who she now calls a “broken and flawed” man struggling with the onset of dementia.
That’s not to say that the book is bad. If you enjoy insider views into Washington, spiced with a bit of media gossip, then it’s actually one of the better tell-alls out there. Nor can we doubt that Omarosa is recounting some version of the truth. By the end, the book rattles off observations that one suspects are well made and draws conclusions that feel solid about Melania, Pence, and, of course, Trump himself. Yet they come too late. One might well have already come to the conclusion that there’s something not entirely on the level about this very unreliable narrator. There is, to borrow a word from the title, something a little unhinged about her story, which perhaps explains why it’s also so damn readable.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.