Former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman makes a stunning claim in her new book, saying President Donald Trump showed signs of “mental decline that could not be denied.”
In an excerpt published Thursday by the Daily Mail, Omarosa says she noticed something was wrong when Trump was interviewed by NBC anchor Lester Holt in May 2017.
“While watching the interview I realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain,” Omarosa writes in Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. “His mental decline could not be denied.”
“Throughout this erratic and contradictory interview, I kept thinking, ‘Oh no! Oh no! This is bad!’” she adds. “Donald rambled. He spoke gibberish. He contradicted himself from one sentence to the next.”
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Omarosa met Trump while serving as a contestant on the first season of his reality show, The Apprentice, in 2004.
The former reality star joined the Trump administration in Jan. 2017, and served as communications director for the White House Office of Public Liaison.
She left the administration in December amid reports of tension with Chief of Staff John Kelly. Omarosa stated publicly that she resigned, but the White House later said she was fired.
Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, published her memoir, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. The book will be released on Aug. 14.
