Omarosa Manigault Newman, who served in the White House under Donald Trump after previously competing on his reality TV show, said the former president’s mental “decline” is becoming more apparent.
Trump’s health has come under scrutiny after a series of bizarre and rambling public appearances followed by the cancellation of multiple high-profile interviews.
“The reason Donald Trump is canceling these interviews is when he starts to stumble, he starts to pivot,” Manigault Newman told CNN’s Laura Coates. “He wants to talk about you. He’ll start attacking you, Laura, instead of talking about policy issues because he can’t recall what they are.”
She said Trump is struggling even with his own message.
“He cannot repeat consistently his position on key issues like the economy, like crime, or like immigration, that are key issues to voters, and that’s what you’re seeing in his decline right now,” she said.
Manigault Newman offered some specific examples on how Trump’s cognition has changed over the years.
“When we were in the boardroom for ‘The Apprentice,’ Donald could come up with these very complicated figures,” she said on CNN. “He could stand there and recall all of the details of a deal and he would share those with us.”
But that changed over time ― and she noticed it in the White House in 2017.
“Donald was unable to recall basic figures. He would forget the names of his Cabinet members,” she said. “He would forget key details of policy issues that we were talking about as we were preparing for him to go out onstage. This was after he was briefed just moments before.”
Manigault Newman detailed problems with Trump’s mental acuity in her 2018 book, especially a passage in which she recalled Trump’s 2017 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.
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“Donald rambled. He spoke gibberish. He contradicted himself from one sentence to the next,” Manigault Newman wrote, adding that she “realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain.”
Manigault Newman was fired by then-chief of staff John Kelly in December 2017 and had to be “physically dragged and escorted off the campus,” The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
She said later that she would never vote for Trump again “in a million years.”
Manigault Newman endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this week.