A former personal aide to President Trump, forced out last year after dishing personal stories about his family in an “off-the-record” dinner with reporters, is back with a vengeance, ripping the media’s ethics and promising to work hard to help reelect the president.
Madeleine Westerhout, the former gatekeeper to the Oval Office, next week is releasing a book about her ouster that also gives an insider’s positive view of the president in Off the Record: My Dream Job at the White House, How I Lost It, and What I Learned.
Largely unknown outside of the president’s circle, the former director of Oval Office operations made headlines when at an off-the-record social dinner with four reporters, she seemed to joke about Trump daughter Tiffany’s weight and suggested she had a better relationship with the president than both Tiffany and Ivanka.
In Trumpworld, talking about family is a strict no-no. She believes that one or two of the four reporters repeated her stories to others and word got back to the president and former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who asked her to leave.
That was followed by several embarrassing media stories.
While the president and a dozen top aides and Cabinet secretaries forgave her, the 29-year-old was out. What’s more, her friendly relationship with Tiffany Trump was over, and the two haven’t talked since.
“It breaks my heart to hurt the president and his family,” she said in an interview Thursday.
Still shaken by her blunder, Westerhout is mounting a comeback with the book that tells her side of the story and seeks to make amends with those she disappointed and angered, including Trump, with whom she has had two other calls since she lost her job a year ago.
“I think that the fact that he forgave me just goes to show how gracious he is,” Westerhout told Secrets. Trump once called her “the secret” to his operation.
In the book, she admits to drinking the day of the late August dinner at the president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump was vacationing. At the Saturday dinner, she drank more and made the comments.
The former Republican National Committee aide wrote that she didn’t think anything of it until one of the reporters, Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs, texted her about how much “fun” the evening was.
By Tuesday, the story had swept through the White House, and she was out by Thursday.
In explaining her actions, she slammed the press. “What does ‘off-the-record’ mean anymore,” Westerhout asked Secrets.
“That was my first experience with reporters,” she said, adding, “I take responsibility.”
In the interview, she said, “I was kind of naive, very naive, and I didn’t think that what happened would happen. In my own way, I was trying to humanize the president and tell another group of human beings that the president and his family are in some ways just like us. They have their own triumphs. They have their own struggles. And honestly, I think my hope was that the reporters I was sitting down with would start to see the president and his family as just another group of people and treat them with respect.”
But, “I believe that the press really reported on this story so much because they hate this president, and they will do what they can to hurt him, and they definitely did hurt him with this story.”
She hopes to use the book and media appearances to promote it to counter negative stories about the president. Several passages describe his worth ethic, his reliance on female aides, his constant reading and warmth for friends and family and staff. It also touches on the importance of tweets for the president and the Team Trump vs. Republican National Committee war that dogged the early days of the administration.
And she plans to campaign hard for Trump. “I hope he knows how much I care for him,” said Westerhout.
