About that Omarosa book: This is what complicity looks like

Everyone is the hero of their own story — but in telling that tale, people often reveal much more about themselves than they realize. That is true of autobiographies in general, and of Unhinged by Omarosa Manigault Newman more than most.  The tell-all book, released Tuesday by the famous former reality show star and communications staffer, has plenty of beans to spill on the dysfunction and casual racism of Donald Trump and his White House.  It's also the story of how the kind of person who seems to think in soundbites could help elect and participate in such an administration without ever really knowing what she was doing. And how, even after reflecting for a year, that person thinks she can avoid doing much soul-searching about her role.  In short, it's a case study in complicity.  SEE ALSO: The 10 most unhinged parts of Omarosa's 'Unhinged' Omarosa doesn't actually call herself complicit anywhere in Unhinged. She did say she was "totally complicit" in a new interview with The Daily Show's Trevor Noah, but said "I didn't go [into the White House] thinking we were going to lie" — a fact that ignores the lies told on the campaign trail, recounted in her book.  She also said she was "complicit in deceiving this nation" in a Meet the Press interview, but quickly pivoted to how everyone in the Trump administration lies all the time. There's not even a sliver of daylight into which a mea culpa can creep.  The book is full of pivots like that — so speedy in spinning our attention away from questions about her moral obligations, it'll give you whiplash.  In the chapters that function as a 2016 campaign diary, Omarosa is repeatedly "troubled" by Trump's racially-charged statements. She is "concerned" by the arrival of campaign chief and alt-right guru Steve Bannon. Disturbed by the "classic dog-whistle racism" in Trump's acceptance speech, she resolves to tell the candidate that "words matter."  But so far as the reader knows, she never actually does that. In the next paragraph, she and Trump slap each other on the back for their success in winning the nomination.  Later, prepping for three disastrous presidential debates, Trump fails to retain any of the anti-racist talking points she feeds him. But not to worry! Time to wipe her cares away by filming an episode of Say Yes to the Dress.  After the Access Hollywood tape dropped, SNL ran a musical parody that features Omarosa quitting the campaign; she watches and laughs and dances around the room, utterly missing the message.   This habit of skimming along the surface of things (and focus on racking up her "media hits") continues once Trump is in power. Scanning the sea of white faces around her on Inauguration Day, still troubled by Trump's recent attack on Civil Rights legend John Lewis, Omarosa solemnly "made a vow that day to increase diversity in Trumpworld."  How she planned to do that, we don't know; she spends the next few pages gushing about the size of her new office in the West Wing. Scouring the detritus of the Obama administration, she scores a 60-inch flat-screen TV with split-screen programming built in, so she could watch all the cable news networks (plus C-SPAN!) at once.  Did Omarosa actually swing the election? Although many post-White House autobiographies are ghost-written, that doesn't seem to be the case here. It's not just that Omarosa boasts of the "strong writing skills" she picked up from a journalism professor; it's that a ghost would surely save her from being so terribly, repeatedly, unintentionally ironic.  The greatest irony is that Omarosa presents herself as having the skills to be so much more than a malevolent mouthpiece. A hardscrabble student who took herself from food-stamp poverty to Howard University, she was ambitious and service-minded. She shook off the horror of her father's and her brother's untimely death. In her 20s, she worked in Al Gore's office before moving to the Clinton White House.  But she'd been winning beauty pageants too — a part of her biography that gets very downplayed here — and the siren call of television turned out to be stronger than that of public service. When The Apprentice was announced, she threw herself into studying Trump like he was a PhD course; her audition tape was a shoo-in.  He became a mentor and she learned exactly what he had: stir conflict, never apologize, and they'll make you a star.  It seems likely that Donald Trump would never have been elected without Omarosa Manigault Newman. Not only did his ratings suffer when she wasn't on the show, but her "diversity outreach" on his campaign probably made all the difference in the world. She got Trump into black churches in key districts when he really didn't want to go.  For some in the African-American communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the mighty Omarosa was a persuasive voice — and as we should never, ever forget, Trump won by a grand total of 77,000 votes in those three states.  It didn't have to happen like this. In 2015, still a registered Democrat, Omarosa was hard at work fundraising for the Ready for Hillary PAC — the stand-in for the Hillary Clinton campaign before she announced. But after she did, the African-American finance committee of Ready for Hillary wasn't rewarded with the positions on the campaign they'd been promised by someone close to the candidate.  It was a slight she would not forget, and Trump called at just the right time. Suddenly she was somebody again — a surrogate in her friend's campaign, persuading herself that the anti-Mexican comments he made straight out of the gate were "racial rather than racism," whatever that means. Besides, she thought, he would never actually win.  In an alternate universe where one PAC staffer was offered a role on the Hillary Clinton campaign, Newman is writing a tell-all memoir about all the scandals in the second Clinton White House.  Back in this universe, a Democratic celebrity who once told Hillary fundraisers to "get behind this sister" ended up telling "every critic, every detractor" to "bow down to President Trump ... the most powerful man in the universe."  The latter comment is something she curiously omits altogether from Unhinged. ADD vs. the KKK Once everything starts to go south in the Trump White House, Newman cuts a pathetic figure. She repeatedly tells us she had "one foot out the door" before another month's worth of narrative goes by. Like the protagonists of Waiting for Godot, her vague desire to move never gets her anywhere.  Not even the nightmare of Charlottesville, a resurgent and murderous Klan full of what Trump called "very fine people," can cause her to do more than wring her hands. She's distracted by fears that her mentor is losing his mental faculties, by a conference she's putting on, by pointless little personality feuds with Kellyanne Conway (for whom Newman reserves her cattiest remarks) and Betsy "Ditzy" DeVos, by the whole clown car.  It's not just the shadow of the KKK that stalks the Trump administration; it's also this kind of ADD.  Omarosa hung around long enough that new Chief of Staff John Kelly was able to fire her on a technicality; some nonsense about using an official car for the Congressional baseball game. She claims the firing was really because she was hot on the trail of an Apprentice outtake tape in which Trump allegedly uses a racial slur. But this is the fuzziest, most-choppily edited part of a very edited narrative, and Newman has already changed her story on whether she's actually heard this tape or not.  The irony here is that a principled post-Charlottesville resignation would have put Newman in the glare of the media spotlight she craves; it would have made everything all about her in a good way. Why didn't she?  To hear her tell it, the answer is "loyalty," but Newman isn't exactly a reliable narrator at this stage. The reader can see she's conflicted, and it's part of a conflict that permeates her life. Is she built for service — such as the ministry she was called to in her post- Apprentice, post-Hollywood life — or for merrily skimming along the surface of things, not caring about the mess in her wake?  Instead of confrontation at a crucial moment, she opts for cowardice, which amounts to complicity — and a cautionary tale for generations. The only thing required for evil to triumph, it turns out, is that a reality show star said nothing. WATCH: Sarah Huckabee Sanders' most ludicrous moments as press secretary

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