She thought she knew him, and she still thinks she knows him well. At least, better than most. But almost a year ago, President Trump’s one-time executive assistant was doing exactly what millions of others have done at least once: Puzzling over a Trump tweet.

There was the first part:

While Madeleine Westerhout has a fully enforceable confidentiality agreement, she is a very good person and I don’t think there would ever be reason to use it.

And then the second half:

She called me yesterday to apologize, had a bad night. I fully understood and forgave her! I love Tiffany, doing great!

The president was publicly discussing, before an August morning tee time, why the 28-year-old former staffer, who faithfully guarded the door of the Oval Office for the better part of his first term, would no longer work for him at the White House. That she’d been fired wasn’t surprising. The subtext was troubling, and that was an odd feeling for Westerhout.

Rarely did she feel distant from her boss. After all, Westerhout was the one who scheduled his calls and scolded cabinet members for taking too much time and even helped him script the occasional tweet.

She fiercely defended the president, and she was reportedly the only one that Sarah Huckabee Sanders at all feared during her time as White House press secretary. She served with unquestionable loyalty and believes that “the president saw me almost as another daughter.” But the tweet made clear, in that moment, she was closer to a prodigal son.

“Taking a deeper look,” Westerhout writes in her just-released memoir, “I couldn’t help but detect a threat in there somewhere. Why else mention a confidentiality agreement?”

Regaining the trust of her former boss has been a yearlong project. And while she never signed a non-disclosure agreement as Trump alleged, she has written a book, aptly titled “Off Record.” Westerhout tells me she wants “the reader to get a clearer picture of what was going through my mind at the time.” Her aim was to make it “read like a diary.”

Her target audience? It includes the current occupant of the Oval Office. Here, an interview on “Fox and Friends” did the trick. Later that morning came another tweet. There was no veiled threat, only an endorsement from Trump: “Go buy this book, a job well done!”

Those two tweets combined with a boozy and ultimately calamitous off-the-record dinner are the main chapters describing the short White House career of the young aide. But beyond the rise and fall she chronicles, Westerhout has accomplished a rare feat in Trump World: Redemption.

News of that absolution came, naturally, in 140 characters, but only after an arduous 251-page public apology that can be found on shelves now. Her transgression was serious. It all started with drinks. At the pool. On an empty stomach.

The president was spending a working vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and Westerhout was nearby. She phoned him to go over some last-minute and long-forgotten detail. The intoxicating compliment, however, was more than memorable. The first lady, she remembers the president telling her, “said you remind her of Audrey Hepburn."

It was an offhand comparison to the fashion and film icon. Combined with the drinks, it was strong enough to put the Westerhout “in such good spirits” that she would do something out of character. She agreed to dinner with deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley. And, more importantly, reporters.

“I surprised myself,” she writes, “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’”

More booze, glasses of red and white wine, and loose lips followed. When Gidley left the table briefly, reporters began to pry. They asked about the first family. They pushed for rare details about the youngest children of the president. All of it meant to satisfy curiosity. None of it for print.

She remembers milquetoast answers. Stephanie Grisham, then-White House press secretary, heard much worse, after the fact.

In Grisham’s office the next week, Westerhout was given a more comprehensive read-out of her own words. She hadn’t just broken the trust of the president. She criticized a member of his family. She had said, so she was told, that the president’s 26-year-old daughter Tiffany was struggling with her weight.

“I didn’t deny a word of it,” she writes. “How could I? I had been drinking. I couldn’t remember everything I’d said to the reporters.” It was a bad slip, an awful one. It was also rare.

Westerhout hardly ever talked to the press. But at her lowest moment, the aide clung to journalism’s so-called lexicon of quotability. And over the phone with me, she rattles off the rules that are supposed to govern how reporters handle sources.

On-record: Information that can be shared without caveat and by quoting the source by name.

On-background: Information that can be used but with conditions, normally without naming the source.

Off-record: Information that cannot be used.

She had hoped those guidelines might save her career. She was mistaken. A year removed, during our interview, she asks, “What does off-the-record even mean anymore?” Out of a job and after brief public disgrace, she adds, “That is a question I'd love to pose to journalists for them to answer themselves.”

But their answer won’t change anything. After a rude crash course in messy journalistic ethics, Westerhout knows as much. None of the reporters at the dinner wrote about it. Her words made it to print anyway. First in the New York Times. Second, and with more embarrassing detail, into Politico.

She wonders how that happened: Did her dinner party companions break trust and tip off other reporters? Worse, did her colleague Hogan Gidley leak?

While both possibilities are entertained in the book, Westerhout doesn’t care anymore (Gidley, now with the Trump campaign, did not respond to request for comment). “I decided that it doesn't really matter how the information was shared, and I don't blame anybody,” she tells me. “I take responsibility for my actions that night.”

The consequences were grave: Word got to Trump, Mick Mulvaney phoned, and she was out of a job.

Relating her worst moment, Westerhout also gives a glimpse of the self-importance she had developed while in the inner circle. Who was Mick Mulvaney to be giving her this news? Hadn’t she earned the right to speak to Trump directly? “Let’s be honest,” she writes, “Mick was the chief of staff in name only. The president never took away ‘acting’ from his title.”

But Mulvaney was a congressman, and before that a successful businessman. Westerhout was neither. She was a young political aide perpetually in the right place at the right time. She worked a semester as an intern on Mitt Romney’s ill-fated presidential campaign (a stint made possible, she writes, after she was thrown out of her sorority for drinking). After graduation, she landed at the Republican National Committee and eventually followed RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to the White House.

How did she get the executive assistant role? Westerhout had the look, and the ability to charm. She was the once anonymous “elevator girl,” an unexpected television starlet, who ferried applicants up and down the floors of Trump Tower during the transition.

In the chaos of the Trump era, those qualifications were apparently enough to land a job as one of the president’s closest aides.

Mulvaney has since been replaced in that role by former North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, and Westerhout has had time for introspection. “I kind of had too high of an opinion of myself,” she explains before adding, “I just tried to do my best for the president every single day. And that might have rubbed people the wrong way sometimes.”

Her new post-White House goal? Avoid rubbing the president or the people around him the wrong way. This includes some backtracking. She says no, contrary to what she wrote in the book, she didn’t detect a legal threat from the president. It was just how “she felt in the moment.”

“The last thing you want is to be a victim of one of the president's tweets,” she explains.

“I didn't ever want the president to think that he would have any reason to worry,” she adds.

Her book published Tuesday, and there is little for Trump to worry about in it. In fact, when asked for comment by RCP, the White House did not respond. No need. The book gives a more glowing account of the president than even some in his own extended family have offered in print.

The assessment Westerhout offers is one of superlatives and without qualification: He is a family man who loves his wife and jealously guards his children. Contrary to what the press might think, the alumnus of the Romney campaign adds, Trump is a man who “respects women more than any other man I have worked for.” She writes about his love of country and a reluctance to enter politics that was only overcome because Trump “believed he was the right man to turn things around.”

Some of this is certainly the product of sincere political conversion. She admits she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. Some of it was learned on the job. Once, when she noticed that the president looked “exhausted,” White House Communications Director Hope Hicks “set me straight right away.”

“Donald Trump is never tired,” Hicks told her, “and he is never sick.” This ingrained hero narrative never stops. But like the raft of recent post-White House memoirs, Westerhout does spill tea.

She wonders why Trump didn’t tell Pence, some days, that the vice president was getting on his nerves with his trips to the Oval Office: “I couldn’t figure out why the president didn’t simply say, ‘Mike, I’ve already seen you five times today.’”

She explains how Lindsey Graham got so much facetime with Trump on the golf course: “Lindsey had all but invited himself, and the president, being the gracious man he is, had agreed.” (A spokesman for the senator denied this).

She remembers when Omarosa Manigault, who “felt entitled, and for no good reason,” would work her way “into meetings that she had no business being in just because she said she needed to represent the African American community.” And she reveals that the disgraced aide wanted to hold her wedding at the White House: “Lindsay Reynolds, then the first lady’s chief of staff, shut the idea down in a hurry."

There are other bits of West Wing gossip, some that current and former staffers will devour, much of it lately eclipsed by worries about the pandemic and the looming election. But what distinguishes the Westerhout manuscript is precisely what will endear her to the president. Namely, her attacks on reporters.

After her treatment by the papers, after an off-the-record agreement was broken, she shares Trump’s sentiment that speaking to the press is like “going to see the wolves.”

“Reporters claim that all they are interested in is telling the truth. Give me a break. They write their story first, act as judge and jury, and worry about the truth later,” she writes early in the book. “When they make a mistake, which is too often the case, good luck getting them to admit it.”

Some of this seems born out of her negative experience with the press. Much of it also seems to stem from real adoration for the president whom she saw “as a father figure,” someone who “was very kind and thoughtful and took care of me, just like my own dad.” During drives home from the White House, she would mix it up with the occasionally critical cab driver, telling them that Trump was “doing a great job” and that “I love him!” And after her indiscretion at dinner, when on the phone apologizing to Trump, she recalls how she told the president that “I loved him and his family.”

The affection was reciprocal. After her dismissal, she apologized to numerous members of the first family. Some responded. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, told her, “We forgive you, and I’m a big believer in second chances.” He did his best to help her land on her feet, she writes, even arranging a meeting for her with an executive at Louis Vuitton. Others did not. She sent a text message to the youngest daughter of the president: “I am so sorry. I hope one day you can forgive me,” she wrote. Tiffany did not respond. Westerhourt doesn’t blame her.

The gig at the luxury fashion conglomerate ended up not being right for Westerhout. Besides, she is busy on a book tour with a double purpose. She seems intent on doing that thing that most in D.C. find hardest: apologizing.

The cynical evaluation is that she wants to get back on the inside, a suggestion that she strongly rejects. “I have no expectations to go back, and I hope to be an advocate for him on the outside.” But what if he asked? “If the president called and asked me to serve, you know, of course you say yes.”

Trump may not have time. A second term is anything but guaranteed. But Westerhout has still achieved a rare accomplishment. In the second tweet, Trump called her “a very smart and already wise young woman.” The wisdom was writing a book without criticism. The reward, returning to his good graces.