Omarosa Says Regrets Being `Complicit' With Trump's White House
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(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump is “truly a racist,” and a “con” when it comes to diversity, said former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman, days before the publication of a tell-all book about the first year of Trump’s administration.
In “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” Manigault-Newman, who typically goes by Omarosa, accuses the president of having used racial slurs years ago on the set of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, the Guardian newspaper reported this week, citing an excerpt of the book ahead of Tuesday’s release.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Omarosa said Trump had never made such comments in her presence but that she’d “heard his voice” on tape “as clear as you and I are sitting here.”
A year after violent white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, Omarosa said she felt “complicit with this White House deceiving the nation” after going on TV to defend Trump’s response to the events at the time.
Frog in Water
“You don’t know that you’re in that situation until it just keeps bubbling and bubbling,” she added.
“I wanted to see the best in him,” Omarosa said of the president’s post-Charlottesville equivocation between the actions of white supremacists and those who opposed them. “He should have been denouncing what we saw as clearly racist Nazis.”
Trump “has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities, but when he talks that way -- the way he did on this tape -- it confirmed that he is truly a racist,” she said.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on ABC’s “This Week” program that Manigault-Newman has undercut her credibility by previously giving glowing endorsements of Trump, and contradicting herself over whether she was fired or resigned.
Taped Her Firing
“I have never a single time heard him use a racial slur about anyone,” Conway said of Trump. “And I also never heard Omarosa complain that he had done that. And so the only thing that’s changed is that she’s now selling books.”
![White House Director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault listens as Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price speaks during a HHS listening session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Wednesday, June 21, 2017.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"53","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBLPvxF.img?h=1066&w=1598&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2489&y=1472"},"dpi":2,"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBLPvxF.img?h=834&w=1248&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2489&y=1472"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBLPvxF.img?h=834&w=1248&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2489&y=1472"}})
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images White House Director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault listens as Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price speaks during a HHS listening session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Wednesday, June 21, 2017.Manigault-Newman, 44, gained renown as a villain on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” and two of its spin-offs.
She served as director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison, which leads outreach to interest groups, and was one of few blacks in Trump’s administration. “I was the only African American at the table,” she said. “People are making decisions about us, without us.”
Omarosa’s departure from the White House was publicly described as mutual, but administration officials indicated at the time that she was asked to leave by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. On Sunday, Omarosa released a tape she secretly made of her firing, in which Kelly describes “significant integrity issues.”
Kelly’s comment that a “friendly departure” meant she could “go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation” felt like a threat, she said.
‘Riddled With Lies’
On Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that Omarosa’s forthcoming book is “riddled with lies.”
“It’s sad that a disgruntled former White House employee is trying to profit off these false attacks, and even worse that the media would now give her a platform, after not taking her seriously when she had only positive things to say about the President during her time in the administration,” Sanders said.
Trump went further on Saturday, calling his former aide a “low-life” during an appearance with bikers at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course. Omarosa married her second husband in 2017 in the ballroom of Trump’s luxury Washington hotel.
To contact the reporters on this story: Andrew Mayeda in Washington at amayeda@bloomberg.net;Jordan Yadoo in Washington at jyadoo@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Murray at brmurray@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Justin Blum
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