Omarosa Writes Donald Trump Showed “Mental Decline” During Lester Holt Interview
Omarosa Manigault-Newman says the “mental decline” of former boss Donald Trump “could not be denied” when she saw the President interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt in May 2017.
‘While watching the interview I realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain,” Manigault-Newman writes in Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, an excerpt of which was “obtained” and partially posted today by DailyMail.com. “His mental decline could not be denied.”
The memoir, from Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, is set for an August 14 pub date, but the Dailymail excerpts gives a taste of what’s to come. The passages include Manigault-Newman’s reactions as she watched Trump tell Holt, among other things, that he asked then-FBI chief James Comey “if it’s possible would you let me know, am I under investigation?”
Trump also called Comey a “showboat” during the now infamous interview.
“Many didn’t notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when,” writes Manigault-Newman, who met Trump as a contestant on The Apprentice and joined his White House communications team in 2017. She was fired following reported clashes with Chief of Staff John Kelly.
“For the Lester Holt interview, I watched it on a small TV in the upper press room (the lower press room was built on top of the old swimming pool and turned into the briefing room) by the press secretary’s office,” she writes. “Throughout this erratic and contradictory interview, I kept thinking, ‘Oh no! Oh no! This is bad!’
“Donald rambled. He spoke gibberish. He contradicted himself from one sentence to the next.”
Manigault-Newman also writes that communications director Hope Hicks “had gone over the briefing with him a dozen times hitting the key point that he had fired Comey based on the recommendation by the DOJ which the vice president and other surrogates had been reinforcing for days.”
Trump, of course, told Holt the opposite, admitting that he had been planning to fire Comey before getting just that recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
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