Talking points
Omarosa: Revenge of the apprentice
President Trump’s “apprentice has outdone the master,” said Christine Emba in The Washington Post. While flogging a tell-all memoir, fired presidential aide and reality TV star Omarosa Manigault Newman has been dominating news cycles in Trumpian fashion with a drip-drip of secret recordings made during her time in the White House. Most explosively, Manigault Newman has revived rumors that there are tapes of Trump using the N-word on the set of The Apprentice, where she was a three-time contestant. In one recording Omarosa released, White House staffers fret about the possibility of the N-word audio coming out and how to “spin” it. In another, the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump offers her a $15,000-a-month job on the Trump 2020 campaign to buy her silence. Manigault Newman is rumored to have as many as 200 tapes, and Trump is clearly rattled by her betrayal, calling her a “lowlife” and “that dog” on Twitter—thus guaranteeing even more publicity. Her training in Trumpworld has served her well.
“Welcome to the Resistance, Omarosa,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Manigault Newman is an “amoral, dishonest, mercenary grifter.” But she’s acting more honorably than former Trump appointees such as Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, who continue to debase themselves for the president. She could easily have had a career in right-wing media, where black celebrities willing to praise Trump and absolve Republicans of racism “will always find patrons.” Instead, she’s telling us that Trump is “a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist” whose rapid mental decline in the White House has alarmed his aides. There are worse ways to cash in than to admit the truth.
It would be funny that liberals suddenly claim Manigault Newman is credible, said Kimberly Ross in WashingtonExaminer.com, except that it’s so sad. Only their tribal hatred of Trump would make them applaud a person who “has consistently shown herself to be a self-serving, artificial, and untrustworthy individual.” Still, Trump has only himself to blame for this mess, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Omarosa is a literal reality show villain. Betraying and backstabbing people on television made her famous. “Nobody thought it was a good idea to bring this woman into the White House” as a $180,000-a-year adviser, except for one man. So much for hiring only “the best people.”