What Omarosa Thinks of Pence, Melania, and the Trump Kids

In her new book, Unhinged, set to be released on Tuesday, Omarosa Manigault-Newman charts her 15 years in the “cult” of Trumpworld, from her Apprentice days to the West Wing. She uses the word—cult—often throughout her 330-page memoir, describing its leader as “mentally impaired,” his followers as “worshipful.”

Manigault-Newman admits to being an unwitting member herself. The former reality-television star writes of knowing that her “friend and mentor,” Donald Trump, was “racial” from the start of their relationship, but not necessarily “racist”—a distinction she can’t quite define, but one she says kept her enmeshed in the cult for more than a decade. Manigault-Newman’s breaking point, in her words, was when chatter about the “N-word tape”—a rumored recording of Trump using the racial slur during his Apprentice days—became “intense again” last fall. Manigault-Newman writes that she has not heard the alleged tape herself, but that she has confirmed through “three sources” that it exists. It is for this reason, she concludes, that she was “brusquely” fired on December 17, 2017, from her post as an assistant to the president, with Chief of Staff John Kelly deep in fear of what she might know, and what she might reveal publicly.

Yet while Manigault-Newman paints herself as a doe-eyed, innocent passenger on the Trump train, unaware of its defects until one bombshell-like moment, she’s not so charitable toward her former colleagues. As Manigault-Newman tells it, she was engaged only in a good-faith effort to serve her country, but people such as Vice President Mike Pence, Hope Hicks, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos were actively intent on destroying it, all in service of their idol: Trump.

Here is how she describes her former “battle buddies” in the cult of Trumpworld, according to an advance copy of Unhinged obtained by The Atlantic.

Vice President Mike Pence

Manigault-Newman writes that she became suspicious of Pence’s ambitions during the