WASHINGTON: Omarosa Manigault Newman, a veteran of reality TV’s The Apprentice and former White House aide, makes a number of shocking claims about President Donald Trump in her new book, but perhaps none is more consequential to the nation than her portrait of him as a man in “mental decline,” who would “forget from one day to the next.”
“He was distracted, irritable, and short,” Newman, 44, writes in Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, out Tuesday, about a briefing she had with the president. “I was going over his speech, but he couldn’t retain any of the bullet points. I went over them again and again, and what he should say to the press after the event.”
She adds, “But he couldn’t remember the key points and stumbled over the large words, which we scratched out and replaced with simpler terms.”
Newman was fired from the White House in December 2017.
In Newman’s most recent account, Trump has changed drastically since she first met him on the set of The Apprentice. She writes that in 2003, Trump was “as smart and shrewd as he claimed to be.”
When discussing figures during The Apprentice‘s first season, Trump could “repeat a lengthy numbers sequence” without any references and calculate them accurately, according to the book. “Now?” Newman writes, “The blade had been dulled.”
Trump was quick to cut her down on Twitter Monday, after she released new audio of a phone call she had with the president about being fired by White House chief of staff John Kelly. Trump described her in his tweet as “vicious, but not smart.”
He added in another tweet, Tuesday, “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
In Unhinged, Newman’s woven multiple examples of what she calls Trump’s “mental decline.”
She reflects on how she felt when she first learned that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, would serve as one of her father’s official advisors. The announcement prompted a wave of backlash and accusations of nepotism.
“You have two people, very close to [President Donald Trump] whose purpose is not the country. The purpose is the man. And that’s a problem, because this is about serving your country,” Cindy McCain said on The View shortly after the announcement.
