If Donald Trump’s White House is a reality-TV show, then Omarosa Manigault is its perfect backstabbing villain. Or at least she hoped to be. The former Apprentice contestant scored a spot in the Trump administration thanks in large part to her tireless loyalty to the president, defending his comments in the wake of a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very clear and very decisive,” and frequently acting as a liaison between Trump’s White House and the African-American community. Then came reports that Manigault had been “physically dragged” from the White House grounds. (The official version of events is that she resigned to pursue other opportunities.) Since the moment she left—or was ejected from—the president’s inner circle, Manigault has turned on Trump, dropping dire hints about what she saw and heard there, and slipping into the Big Brother house to proclaim that Trump’s presidency is “going to not be O.K.” She stoked the intrigue with a publishing deal, and now it seems she’s poised to capitalize on one of the juiciest aspects of Trump’s presidency: his questionable mental state.

On Thursday, the Daily Mail published an excerpt of Manigault’s upcoming tell-all, in which she describes her reaction to a controversial interview Trump conducted with NBC’s Lester Holt, just days after Trump fired F.B.I. chief James Comey. According to Manigault, Hope Hicks, then a White House press aide, reminded Trump “a dozen times” of the White House’s official position: Comey was fired based on the recommendation of the Department of Justice. Instead, Trump revealed on live TV that he had planned to fire Comey long before the D.O.J. sent its letter suggesting he do so—and that the proximate cause was “this Russia thing.”

Manigault, who had worked with Trump on and off for 15 years, professes to be horrified. “While watching the interview I realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain,” she wrote. “His mental decline could not be denied. Many didn’t notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when. They thought Trump was being Trump, off the cuff. But I knew something wasn’t right.” She goes on to describe Trump’s interview as “erratic and contradictory,” and says Trump “rambled,” “spoke gibberish, [and] contradicted himself from one sentence to the next.” (The White House did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.)

As an original Trump protégé, Manigault is well versed in attracting maximum press coverage. The mononymous celebrity, after all, has a book to sell. But her narrative chimes with one that has long circled the White House. In October, several people close to the president told my colleague Gabriel Sherman that the president was “unstable” and “unraveling,” distracted and consumed by dour moods. “He’s lost a step. They don’t want him doing adversarial TV interviews,” one Trump adviser told Sherman. (The White House denied these accounts.) In his explosive (and controversial) book Fire and Fury, journalist Michael Wolff claimed that the question of Trump’s mental health has been widely discussed among those who often interact with the president, particularly his friends from before his entrance into politics. “Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions,” Wolff wrote. “It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories—now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions—he just couldn’t stop saying something.”

The question of Trump’s fitness is not an idle concern, nor one that is consigned to the fringe. Earlier this year, a Yale University psychiatry professor—one of over 100 medical professionals who signed a letter expressing their alarm over Trump’s mental state—held a closed-door briefing with several Democrat senators and at least one Republican to give her assessment of Trump’s acuity. Her conclusion was not encouraging. “We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress,” she told lawmakers, according to Politico. “Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.” (The White House has repeatedly shrugged off these claims.) Manigault’s insistence on delving back into the minefield may be designed to leverage our collective horror at the idea of a man in decline given access to the nuclear codes. But it’s easy to see why she’s succeeded.