Drama queen
Trump’s perfect TV villain Omarosa returns with Even more fireworks
NBA bad boy Dennis Rodman looks embarrassed. Lil Jon, the hip-hop star who ignited airwaves with a single meme-worthy catchphrase (“YEAH!”) appears to be suddenly stunned into silence. Country crooner Trace Adkins’s face is cemented with an awkward look like a kid caught between warring parents.
Even the ringmaster of this particularly reality TV circus, Donald Trump, seems to want to be anywhere else than the boardroom where Celebrity Apprentice cast member Omarosa Manigault Newman tangles with her arch-nemesis Piers Morgan in the show’s 13th season.
“You know my argument against you has always been that you are not a celebrity,” Morgan blasts from his seat at the table, delivering a particularly nasty blow on a TV show premised entirely on the star power of the contestants.
“And you are?” Manigault Newman shot back, the retort dripping condescension.
It was one of the great showdowns in the show’s 15-season run. Millions of viewers had come to expect theatricality from Manigault Newman, the once-nobody turned reality television villain who used her infamy in Trump’s boardroom to jump onto the higher rungs of U.S. pop culture. She was invited to talk shows, splashed on magazine covers. Trump himself tweeted in March 2013 that “Omarosa always promises and delivers high drama.”
But that high drama has now boomeranged back to Trump. Manigault Newman’s book Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House hit bookstores Aug. 14. As The Washington Post has reported, the tell-all reportedly paints the U.S. president as “unqualified, narcissistic and racist.”
She reportedly writes about a rumoured tape featuring Trump using the N-word. Manigault Newman has also claimed she was offered a Us$15,000-amonth contract to stay mum after losing her White House job last December. On Sunday she released a secretly recorded tape of Chief of Staff John F.
Kelly in the White House Situation Room. She later released a recording of her and Trump in a phone conversation.
Manigault Newman’s public career has followed a uniquely 21st-century calculus for success: start with zero; get on television; behave badly; reap the success; repeat. “Zero” for Manigault Newman was Youngstown, Ohio, a once-mighty steel town gutted by globalization.
It was the first season of The Apprentice that launched Manigault Newman into the reality television echelon in 2004. Among the 16 contestants vying for a job in Trump’s organization, she stood out as a ruthless competitor who knew exactly how to stoke conflict among the cast members for maximum television drama.
Manigault Newman was back when Trump retooled the program for the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. Her most epic onscreen rivalry was with Morgan.
“I have absolutely no respect for Piers,” she says in one episode. “My whole mission was to break him down. And I knew his weak spots. And I exploited them.”
Then both on the campaign trail and during her time in the White House, she zealously defended the president against accusations of sexism and racism.
“I am living the American dream because of Donald Trump,” Manigault Newman wrote in a December 2016 guest column for The Hollywood Reporter. “Look at my career, the wealth and exposure that I’ve had: It’s very difficult to make the argument that Donald Trump doesn’t like black people and black women.”
But scrapping with Morgan on camera is one thing; secretly recording a retired United States Marine Corps general in one of the most secure parts of the White House — that’s drama of a new level.