Trump: betrayed by his apprentice
It’s hard to believe, said Tom Leonard in the Daily Mail, but President Trump’s fury – never far from the surface – has now reached a pitch we’ve never seen before. The catalyst? A book by his former adviser, Omarosa Manigault Newman, in which she accuses him of being in “mental decline”, unable to read properly and of using the N-word “multiple times”. Trump has responded by calling her a “crazed lowlife” and “wacky and deranged” – unpresidential slurs that were particularly ill-advised given she was the only black person in his inner circle. It’s not only her insults that have got to him: it’s the fact she was his protégée. Newman caught Trump’s eye as a “bullying, conniving and shockingly devious” contestant in his reality TV show, The Apprentice; now, “like Dr Frankenstein and his monster, the pair are slugging it out to determine who can inflict the greatest damage on the other”. There may be more to come: Newman has threatened to blow the whistle on corruption within the administration and to name illegitimate children fathered by the president.
The fact that Newman has known Trump for 15 years gives her “a peculiar kind of expertise”, said The Economist. She estimates he has drunk 43,800 cans of Diet Coke in the time that she’s known him, and claims he has two beds in his bedroom – one to sleep in and a tanning bed. But amid the gossip are moments of insight: she identifies his greatest flaw as a “total lack of empathy”, and notes that “if you leave or betray the Trump cult, you are labelled crazy and pathetic”. That’s certainly true in her case. Actually, said Bre Payton on The Federalist, Newman has escaped lightly given her “wild” claims – which just goes to show how biased the media is against Trump. NBC has played two excerpts from secret recordings she claims to have made in the White House – one of her talking to Trump, the other of her being fired by John Kelly, his chief of staff – but clearly didn’t check how heavily she’d edited them. “When it comes to this president, all the rules of journalism get thrown out of the window.”
But the fact that Newman made the recordings at all is a “glaring reminder” of one of Trump’s chief failings as a leader, said The New York Times: “his disastrous judgement” in choosing staff. Surrounding oneself with loyal, smart, “preferably non-corrupt people” is important for any president, but it’s all the more vital for one with no relevant experience. Ironically for the man who hosted The Apprentice, Trump’s claim to have a keen eye for talent turns out to be “a mix of alternative facts and hot air”.