Omarosa's book is an unconvincing mess

The biggest problem with Unhinged is not that it is ultimately a shaggy-dog story or that it is full of bad writing and atrociously edited, but simply that it is not convincing. Does Omarosa really expect us to accept that she joined the Trump team because she “wanted to work with Donald to understand his broken outlook, and I believed I was teaching him about the danger of starting a cultural war, a race war, of stirring up these dark elements in our society”? Is this even compatible with her insistence elsewhere that “during the campaign [she] had expressed concern for [Trump’s] mental health?” Apropos of last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, she tells us, “Given our relationship, I couldn’t believe Trump was a racist — but the people at this protest obviously were!” This must be one of the most significantly ambiguous givens in the history of English prose. Over and over again she insists to us that she was able to help the president in good conscience because of an indelible feeling that he was at bottom a good man, repeating the fact that she had known and respected him since The Apprentice in 2003. What finally changed her mind? Even she admits that she was comfortable working for him until virtually the moment she was no longer doing so. After being summarily dismissed by Chief of Staff John Kelly, she says she felt “as if a hypnotist’s assistant had snapped his fingers and the hypnosis was now over.” Maybe, but who was the hypnotist?

Unhinged is at its best when Omarosa is doing things like insisting that Trump’s love for his daughter Ivanka is unabashedly incestuous and that the latter “exploits his fixation with her to get her way.” This is a perfectly vile thing to say. It is also, I think, exactly what Omarosa really believes. This side of her also comes out when she tells us, “I always found Hope [Hicks] to be very nice, capable, sensitive, and out of her depth,” and that Trump “is clearly obese” because of “his addiction to Big Macs and fried chicken.” In a similar vein, she frankly admits that she was happy to accept “a high-profile job” from David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, in lieu of demanding a retraction from the magazine of a misleading report about her brother’s funeral. Here, finally, we see the person Trump seems to have recognized as a kindred spirit. There are not nearly enough of these bits.