Our marriage was hunky dory
when I was working for the candidate.
But when it transitioned over to
the candidate becoming president
and there was an opportunity
for me to work in the White House,
I became overly ambitious on that
at the great detriment to my marriage,
and so I was neglectful, fighting with my wife,
my children felt neglected.
So eventually, my wife and I got to the verge of a divorce
and complete separation,
but once I was rejected from the White House,
as painful and as humiliating as that was,
it caused a major re-centering of my priorities.
It was an awakening for me,
and frankly, I learned the hard way
how important it was for me to put my marriage back together
and to be focused on the right priorities
as opposed to the wrong ones.
Deire, thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
So it's got to be
interesting I guess is the word
to experience this from your point of view
when all of this happened really fast.
Yeah, yeah.
How did this affect you guys?
Did he come home and say,
"Guess what?
"I'm gonna start working in the White House."
No, we actually never really talked about it.
So obviously he was campaigning with him.
I was involved with that, which was great,
and then one thing led to another, it kind of like
spiraled out of control, and...
The next thing we knew, Donald Trump was the president.
Yeah.
And Anthony was signed up to be with him,
so it was never really a conversation,
it was definitely a weird dynamic, you know.
I knew that he always had political ambitions,
but this kind of happened
and we never really, really discussed it before, so...
You didn't discuss this with your wife?
No, but he's kind of like an impetuous guy,
and in many ways that's great
and in some ways it's tough when you're married.
He's really driven, he's really motivated,
which I admire, obviously, and I love about him,
but in some situations,
you would want to have that conversation,
especially in this type of, this type of situation.
How did she react to the new job?
Listen, we were fighting as a precursor to the new job
and I think, what I think is important here
as with everything when you're having failures,
failure in a relationship, failure in a job,
is to be personally accountable,
and so for me, I would say to people in the same situation,
get your priorities right.
And so what happened to me
is my priorities went upside down on me
because of the situation and I became overly ambitious.
I became misguided, and I ended up doing things
that today I totally regret.
And so now there's two things you have to do.
You have to one, forgive yourself,
and then the other thing is the people that you love,
you have to actually turn to and ask for forgiveness.
You had filed for divorce
about the time you took the job, right?
Well actually, so okay,
it's stemmed, it goes back like maybe to the campaign,
because he was working so hard,
and like really involved with it,
and we have a young son who was three at the time,
and I was also expecting another baby,
so it's kind of hard to be home.
A lot of people can relate to that when you have two young,
well one young son and one on the way,
and I was like,
"Where's Anthony?
"I miss Anthony."
that kind of thing,
and so we had some tension.
It wasn't like major, it was, you know, marital tension
that people have, especially when you have young kids,
it's stressful.
But then like I said, he got elected,
which was completely surprising to me, at least,
and...
And then.
Maybe some other, maybe some other people could be
surprised by that, maybe.
How does your family feel about Trump?
It's really tough on me and my family because...
They're not big Trump fans?
No.
(laughs)
No, honestly...
Some of them are, to be fair, some of them are.
It's not totally like, you know, polarized.
It's, nobody talk, I used to like set ground and was like,
"Nobody talk about politics.
"Don't say anything."
I was all stressed out, it was ridiculous.