Unhinged

August 20, 2018
In this venomous tell-all, the Trump presidency resembles the reality show that birthed it. Newman recounts her journey from a 2004 turn on the Trump-hosted television competition The Apprenticeâwhere, she candidly recounts, she crafted a provocative, troublemaking persona to succeedâto her work on his presidential campaign and 2017 stint in the White House Office of Public Liaison, where, as one of the administration's few African-American staffers, she struggled to spin his policies to women and minorities. She describes her gradual emergence from blind loyalty to the "cult" of "Trumpworld" into viewing the president as "a racist, a bigot and a misogynist" who is "just this side of functionally illiterate" and suffering "mental decline," which she blames for his tweets. Newman is similarly cutting about other administration figures like Kellyanne Conway ("a calculat swamp monster") and first daughter Ivanka, who, Newman alleges, manipulates Trump's purported quasi-incestuous infatuation with her. Few of these accusations are new; Newman's splashiest revelation is her unverified claim to have a tape of Trump using the n-word. (She has released tapes that confirm her account of her firing and contradict what Trump and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said about it.) This entertaining, gossipy memoir of White House dysfunction will be catnip to scandal lovers.

The one-time reality TV contestant and player in an ongoing White House drama bares all--and hints at more.According to Newman, there's a recording out there with the N-word spilling out of the mouth of the sitting president. "During production," she writes, "he was miked, and there is definitely an audio track." That she or some other former staffer hasn't brought forth such a thing, she suggests, is just a matter of time, but no matter. Here, the former Apprentice cast member dishes on Donald Trump--and just about everyone else in the White House in the last couple of years. A few are spared: Anthony Scaramucci, for instance, was "cocky and arrogant...but oddly likable," while Trump referred to Kellyanne Conway's contrarian husband as "Flip," for "f*cking little island people," a reference to his Filipino heritage. As for first daughter Ivanka? "Like her father," writes the author, "Ivanka was thin-skinned and could not seem to take a joke." But most of the news, such as it is, in this memoir is about Trump himself, and there's not much that even the casual observer wouldn't know: Trump thrives on chaos? Check. He has anger issues? Check. The White House is a mess? Check. The memoir serves as reinforcement, in other words, rather than as fresh meat, and as such, it's fairly dispensable, especially as the author attempts to explain why she went to the Trump side in the first place: She came from a rough side of town where wealth and power were aspirations and those who had them were role models, and as for his aberrations, well, "he was just overwhelmed, as we all were, by the awesome responsibility of leading the nation." Once the veil is lifted and she escapes "from the cult of Trumpworld," things get a little more critical--Racist? Check. Rattled? Check--but no more newsworthy.Firmly in the secondary tier of books about the bizarre, chaotic crew at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

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