THE OTHER WHITE HOUSE TV STAR
Celebrity Big Brother gives fascinating glimpse into a Machiavellian mind
I once took Omarosa for a haircut. At 11:30 at night. Lost in the crevices of my memory — it’s amazing what gets buried during a lifetime of gallivanting — the vignette only rose up again rather recently, while watching America’s consummate villain morph, amazingly, into a surrogate for her boss from The
Apprentice when he ran for prez; eventually move into a staff position at the White House; summarily lose said position in classic operatic fashion and then live to tell the tale (or spill the tea, as the kids say) over the last couple of weeks on Celebrity Big Brother. My time with the schemer — scanning my own archives — started one eve in 2005, at Sassafraz here in Toronto, where I went to interview Omarosa and, whereupon, she talked piously about Eleanor Roosevelt (yes, really) and ended with a night out on the town (because: YOLO). At one point, running into celebrated local coiffeur Jie Matar, at Amber in Yorkville, he took one look and told her that she needed a new ’do. She was game.
Hence, our trip to a hair salon just before the witching hour.
Along the way, she was as brash and as opinionated as one might expect. “Dr. Phil is really dumb,” was one of her assertions, followed by some choice words about Janice Dickinson, the erstwhile supermodel (not a fan).
As for her MO on the reality show that first curried her favour with Donald Trump, she memorably told me, “I found out very early that if you’re a good girl you get one camera on you. If you’re naughty, you get five.”
Having kept tabs on CBS for the last many nights, it’s clear to me that the woman has not wavered.
What’s been particularly fascinating about watching Omarosa on the debut U.S. edition of Celebrity Big Brother (besides the fact that it had barely been one lunar cycle before she moved from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to talking to Julie Chen) was the prospect of watching the wheels spinning in real time as she tried to settle scores and “rebrand” herself. Or, as pop-culture critic Ira Madison recently noted about this latest turn, “It’s like she’s a television character who’s had a different head writer every season.”
Bizarre-o-ville, all right: this whole reality exercise, given that almost every day in the Big Brother House came some honest-to-goodness “breaking news,” because of the one-time Howard University grad who previously had a last name, Manigault.
In the greatest corroboration of the meld these days between politics and celebrity, we’ve seen her — as she tangled with the likes of E!’s Ross Mathews and Real Housewife Brandi Glanville and that woman from Colombia who was once mistakenly announced as Miss Universe by Steve Harvey — dole out morsel after morsel about her time in that other bubble.
“I was haunted by tweets,” the 44-year-old revealed, pretty much on Day 1, in probably her most viral quote re: life in the White House. Confirming at one point that she wouldn’t vote for Trump again “in a million years” (this, even though she bombastically said in an interview after the 2016 election that “every critic, every detractor would have to bow down to President Trump”), she also spurred a discussion about DACA immigration policy, weighed in on one-time press secretary Sean Spicer, confirmed that she had never slept with the president and declared Vice-President Mike Pence was “scarier” than Trump (“He thinks Jesus tells him things to say”).
It’s all been even more astonishing than the man who proclaims to be Mark McGrath, another contestant in the Big Brother House, who looks like an older woman who might have had surgery to look like Mark McGarth. But I digress. Because we are talking about Omarosa, the truth is clearly foggy at best — and because her last days in Trumpville ended less than gloriously (reports flew that she was physically removed from White House grounds after being fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly) — her game on Celebrity Big Brother has been an interesting glimpse into the Machiavellian mind.
Because she had no real allies going into the show — and it’s a show where anybody can become Head of House (HOH) or, heck, get a veto vote and get rid of you (as opposed to one omnipotent arbiter, as on The Apprentice) — she had to go in, at least initially, by playing coy. Or at least cautious. Or, at the very least, not with guns blazing. “I actually think this is how she interacted with Ivanka in the White House,” Madison has observed. I agree!
Another crafty move — one that acted as a strange counterpoint to the rise of Black Panther in this Black History Month — was the secret alliance that Omarosa tried to strike with Keisha Knight Pulliam, that little girl all grown up from The Cosby Show. Having received a lot of resistance from “the community” over the years, Omarosa even dubbed this alliance “Black Girl Magic,” using this tele-moment to not only rebrand herself as antiTrump but as pro-Black, apparently. Oh boy. Figure skater Nathan Chen, in other words, wasn’t the only one trying out quad jumps on TV this past week.
Omarosa, of course, pretty much gave away her rules for living in her first book, The Bitch Switch, years ago. A woman in control, she wrote, “determines her own rules of engagement for every situation.”
While life on Celebrity Big Brother unfolded just as expected from the tropes established by this standard of reality TV — all those shifting of alliances, all that planting of seeds of doubt, all the prodding and poking — it’s notable that the White House, with its reality-show commanderin-chief, did nothing but blur the political-pop lines some more after Omarosa’s initial comments on the show surfaced. Speaking during an official briefing, a spokesperson, when asked, quipped glibly, “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice and this is the fourth time we let her go.” Notice the “we” in that statement?
Back in the Big Brother House, there was probably no more telling moment than when Omarosa, losing a challenge, excused herself briefly after claiming to have suffered an asthma attack, turning the whole house into a hot bed of conjecture and what-ifs. Maybe only when she came gunning for Mathews, putting him up for eviction midway through the show, when she had made HOH. Despite it all, he admitted in his confessional: “It’s pretty cool that I just got nominated by Omarosa on a reality show. I mean, that’s gonna be the best dinner party story ever!”
Question is: where to from here for Omarosa? How long can she keep all this up?
As Time magazine’s Daniel D’Addario has pointed out, “reality TV success is a matter of jumping from lily pad to lily pad — staying alive in the game week by week, then getting booked for another season of something or other.”
And, yet, “there are few future bookings that make the sort of sense for Omarosa than a show where D-listers strategize against one another in a sequestered house (a show with a format that allows for endless chatter, giving her a chance to spew alternative facts!). Having done that, there seems little left.”
And yet and yet . . . this is Omarosa we’re talking about, after all. The very woman, who when riffing on her time with the Trump administration, spoke directly to the camera and confirmed on the show: “If I learned anything in the last year, I learned this: you don’t retreat, you reload.” The season finale of Celebrity Big Brother airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Global and CBS.