Omarosa Manigault Newman first met the US president when she was a contestant on The Apprentice, and thanks to this, I was at first a bit sniffy when she popped up in The Trump Show (15 October, 9pm). Tell me something I don’t know, I thought, as she revealed that even once he was installed in the White House, Trump “was always selling”. But then, like so many others who appear in this utterly surreal new series, she delivered her killer fact. After his election, Newman briefly worked as an aide to the president. She claims that shortly before his inauguration he told her that he was thinking of swearing his oath of office not on the Bible, but on his tawdry 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
We all know that Trump is in a world of “me”. What these films brilliantly reveal, however, is the vanishingly small extent of this realm. His horizons really do extend only to the brocade on the corner of the nearest sofa. It was Michael Wolff, the journalist who unaccountably managed to get access to the West Wing during Trump’s first year, who put it best in episode one, when he urged us to consider the president’s life before Washington. His home in the Trump Tower, New York, where he had lived since 1984, was, Wolff said, a veritable time capsule. All the “gold stuff” with which he’d filled it: barely a thing had changed for 30 years. Hardly surprising, then, that on arrival at the White House, he required a lock for his bedroom door; that he told staff he would change his own sheets, thanks. Put your own amazement at his election to one side, Wolff said. No one was more freaked out by the upset than Trump.
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