PREZ ON BRINK
Omarosa says his Diet Coke addiction leads to mental and physical decline
President Trump has a coke habit, according to a new poison-pen book about the White House.
Not the white powder craved by disco queens and Wall Street strivers, the diet kind.
In “Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House,” former reality-TV starturned-White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman says the President’s mental and physical decline in the most powerful office in the world is because he likes the soda a little too much. The Daily News received an advance copy of the book due out Tuesday
In fact, the President keeps a box on his desk with a button that he can push when he wants his favorite beverage.
“The world has yet to learn about the extent of Donald Trump’s Diet Coke habit,” she says in the book.
“He always had one in his hand, as far back as I’ve known him. He’s up to eight cans a day, at least. Eight cans a day, for the last 15 years, is 43,800 cans of Diet Coke, poured into his system. In the White House, he just pushes a button in a wooden box on his desk. He can summon anything with that button. Whenever I went in to brief him, he’d push the button and get us Diet Cokes.”
Manigault Newman sprinkles similar presidential oddities throughout the tell-all book of her monthslong tenure in the White House.
He keeps a tanning bed in his private residence where he bronzes every day. “He prefers to do it in the morning so he ‘looks good all day,’ ” she writes.
The President owns two handguns, a .45-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol and a .38caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, which he brags about from time to time.
His instincts on international affairs are a little off, she says. Though he has a soft spot for ladimir Putin, he’s not such a fan of the prime minister of Montenegro, whom he nudged out of the way during a photo op at the 2017 NATO summit.
Manigault Newman questioned him on the move.
“I asked him , ‘You came off a little aggressive, why did you do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s just a whiny punk b---h.’ ”
All of his strange habits can be traced back to Diet Coke, Manigault Newman claims.
“When I started to have grave concerns for his mental health, I connected the dots to his physical health and poor choices, specifically, his soda habit,” she said.
She said she looked into it and found support for her hypothesis. “I researched it, and found a brand-new study by a team of neurologists from Boston University that linked Diet Coke consumption with dementia and increased risk of stroke. Dementia. Not being able to remember anything, confusion, loss of vocabulary and ability to process information. Stroke,” she writes.
She said you can see Trump’s physical decline.
“Those awkward shaking hands, struggling to bring a bottle of water to his mouth . . . . I printed out the study and put it in his stack. He never read it. Rob Porter did and he gave me a warning. After a senior staff meeting, he said, ‘Stop putting articles in the President’s folder. You to go through me first. Don’t do it again,’ ” she said.
Manigault Newman’s
stopped by NBC’s “Today” show Monday, where she said Trump may lack the mental capacity to know what’s going on in his White House.
“He’s different than the person I met back in 2003,” she said. “He has some serious mental impairment.”
According to Manigault Newman, she and other White House aides would frequently coordinate with Trump in morning meetings only to see their plans go down the drain. “By that afternoon, he will have tweeted something without telling us, completely contradictory of what he said in the morning,” she said. “It would not help advance the policy that people had worked on for months and months and months.”
Manigault Newman’s concerns for the President’s health have not been appreciated.
Trump spent Monday morning lashing out at the former “Apprentice” star.
“Wacky Omarosa, who got fired three times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time,” he posted before noon. “She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said Ok. People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard . . . . ”
About 10 minutes later, he continued.
“. . . really bad things. Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me — until she got fired,” the President tweeted.
But Trump also had great things to say about Manigault Newman, until her book tour started. “Thank you Omarosa for your service! I wish you continued success,” he tweeted in 2017.
For her part, Manigault Newman appeared to be prepared to go to the wall for Trump as well, until she was let go. “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” she wrote on Twitter, buttering up Trump during the 2016 transition period. “It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”
Trump acknowledged that spending so much time responding to the former staffer’s accusations did not befit the office, but he insisted that it was necessary to get his version of the story out there.