Omarosa Manigault Newman had few friends during her 11-month stint as communications director for the White House Office of the Public Liaison.
Leaving the West Wing last December didn’t change that; it made things worse. And with Manigault Newman now prepared to debut a tell-all book next week about her time inside the pinnacle of power, she’s gained all the enemies in the world.
Asked about their former colleague’s new book, a half-dozen former and current White House officials said the former “Celebrity Apprentice” star, who joined the Trump campaign in mid-2016 to help with African-American outreach and later became one of the highest-paid staffers inside the Trump White House, was work-shy and a consistent source of drama.
Few said they were surprised by her decision to join CBS’ long-running reality TV competition “Big Brother” just weeks after being removed from her role, and even fewer were fazed when excerpts from her upcoming book suggested she planned to use the project to eviscerate her former boss.
“Who in the political world would hire Omarosa? Who would have paid to hear Omarosa analyze Trumpism or opine on news of the day? The only way for her to have a continued taste of fame is to attack the president; it’s that simple,” said one former White House official.
The same official fell into a fit of hysterical laughter when the Washington Examiner inquired about some of the claims made in Manigault Newman’s new book: that Trump had a tanning bed installed inside the executive residence; that he once chewed and swallowed a piece of paper to hide sensitive information from his staff; and that she was offered a $15,000-a-month contract after her firing to join the president’s re-election campaign and refrain from speaking publicly about her time in the White House.
“When I departed the White House, there was zero offer like that made to me, and I don’t know of any former White House staffer who has gotten a similar offer,” the official said, adding that Manigault Newman is “a known liar with no credibility, who is obviously trying to say the most salacious things possible to sell her book.”
The source said there was no way the president’s re-election campaign would re-hire her for nearly $200,000 a year when “there was no one who did less on the [2016] campaign functionally than Omarosa.”
“She was a joke. I don’t know how else to describe it. Nobody took her seriously,” added a person familiar with Manigault Newman’s work on the Trump campaign.
The explosive new book, “Unhinged,” is rife with claims about Trump’s personal life and the chaos that marred his administration in its infancy – a la Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which caused a falling out between the president and his chief strategist earlier this year, along with a headache for the West Wing communications shop.
But what sets Manigault Newman’s expected page-turner apart from other Trump world authors is a claim she made while advertising it to potential publishers, and the various passages that have leaked so far.
According to the Daily Beast, Manigault Newman told friends and some figures in the literary world that she often secretly recorded her conversations with the president while serving in the White House. She kept the tapes and plans to tease them further as her release date nears “to ignite controversy and boost her sales,” said a person who spoke with Manigault Newman earlier this month.
“I don’t know what’s on the recordings,” said a former Trump campaign adviser. “But I wouldn’t doubt that she recorded stuff. She used the White House as her own personal gain on a daily basis, and so for her to do that to the president isn’t that outlandish.”
Beyond her own tapes, the former reality TV star wrote in her new book that she spent months during her time in the White House trying to locate a rumored tape from Trump’s days on “The Apprentice” in which he reportedly used the “N-word” during an off-air conversations.
It’s that claim, along with others in her book, that left White House aides and allies infuriated this week, including a senior Trump campaign official who recalled a conversation with Manigault Newman during the 2016 presidential race in which she repeatedly sought to discredit rumors of such a damning audio recording.
“I remember very specifically calling Omarosa to ask her about it and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing,’ so I assumed that there was nothing,” the official told the Examiner. “If she knew a tape existed, why would she go on the campaign trail, be very publicly saying all these nice things about the president but in the back of her mind think they aren’t true?”
The same person disputed Manigault Nerman’s claim that the campaign once held meetings to discuss how to deal with the rumored tape if it ever turned out to be real: “That had always been sort of an urban legend and we, on the campaign, were never once worried about it.”
In another instance, according to a book excerpt shared with the Examiner, Manigault claimed that a colleague once texted her a list of ten mid-to-high level White House officials who were “suspected leakers” and would be fired by then-communications director Anthony Scaramucci following a Trump rally in Ohio last summer. The list was compiled by first daughter and White House adviser Ivanka Trump, Manigault Newman claimed, with the help of other “original Trumpers.”
“Ivanka wanted a new list, and once she had it, she would give it to Scaramucci so he could fire them all,” she wrote.
Trump’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“She makes herself seem like she was this pivotal figure, one of the ‘original Trumpers,’ and also says things that are demonstrably false,” said one former White House official, who obtained a copy of Manigault Newman’s book and described it as “totally delusional.”
Much of criticism of Manigault Newman circles back to her job performance and the shared feeling among most Trump officials that she never belonged in the White House to begin with, no matter what exaggerated claims her book may or may not contain.
“It is true that no one knew what she did,” said the senior Trump campaign official, who worked with Manigault Newman during the campaign, transition, and inside the West Wing.
“She wasn’t engaged,” said a current White House official, who recalled meetings with Manigault Newman where she would “bring an assistant to take notes for her” and periodically chime in with “off-topic” comments.
“During the transition, she had a personal attendant everywhere she went. Nobody knew who it was,” said the former Trump campaign adviser. “I remember talking with another transition official about a Cabinet nomination issue one day and she passed us very slowly, all regal-like, and my colleague looked at me and said, ‘This is the world we’re living in.’”
One former White House official said they would be hard-pressed to come up with “a single person who actually thought Omarosa deserved to be in the White House.”
“That’s not a race thing; it was a competency thing,” the official added, claiming Manigault Newman was “handed everything on a silver platter and it’s just an embarrassment for her to be out there doing what she’s now doing.”
