A year ago this weekend, the city of Charlottesville became the backdrop to a violent American reckoning. Donald Trump’s declaration that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the conflict marked the first moment in his Presidency in which Republicans were forced to disagree, however tepidly, with him in public.
Cued almost perfectly to the anniversary come the first rumblings regarding Omarosa Manigault’s forthcoming memoir and her allegations that Trump is a racist who habitually tosses around anti-black epithets. The Guardian reported that Manigault, in her book, says that she looked into rumors that there were tapes of “Apprentice” outtakes that allegedly include Trump using the word “nigger” and that, although she never tracked them down, she became convinced that they existed. (The Washington Post reported that Manigault claims to have declined a contract proffered by Lara Trump for a fifteen-thousand-dollar monthly payment that Manigault believed amounted to hush money.) Manigault frames her tenure in the White House as a period of gradual awakening to Trump’s bigoted outlook. Even after leaving the Administration, she offered the nonsensical hedge that Trump is “racial” but not racist—a position that is roughly equivalent to being human but not Homo sapiens.
In response to press reports about Omarosa’s book, the White House mounted its typical immune response. Sarah Huckabee Sanders denounced her former colleague, saying, “Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his Administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations. 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.”
Manigault, who was a serial contestant on “The Apprentice,” had known Trump for years before he became President. Her realization about Trump’s outlook appears to have emerged at some point during her book deal. That’s not a gradual awakening, it’s a glacial, self-interested one. Despite abundant evidence, serial outrages, and Trump’s own words, the news media have tended to frame Trump’s racism as more of a question than a statement—a tendency that survived Charlottesville. There’s potential profit, or at the least publicity, in offering first-person confirmation that Trump is, indeed, what reasonable observers and the half of the American public already consider him to be: a racist. The temptation is to see the possibility of Trump uttering racial slurs on the “Apprentice” tapes as too little, too late, but for the likelihood that it would have been insufficient even if it had been delivered before his election. Trump’s hard-core supporters have proved to be morally malleable. They are unconcerned about a wide array of his character failings; there’s no reason to suspect that this one would have been different.
Trump’s personal history was a bramble of backward racial ideas long before the tiki torches were lit in Charlottesville last summer. His personal history yields an impressive greatest-hits collection that would include him beginning his Presidential campaign by conflating Mexicans with rapists and later stating that Judge Gonzalo Curiel should not preside over the Trump University fraud suit because of his Hispanic heritage. Trump asked a friend of Karen McDougal, the former Playmate with whom Trump had an extramarital affair, if she liked “big black dick.” There is also, of course, the matter of the Justice Department accusing the Trump family firm of discriminating against African-American renters in the seventies (Trump settled the suit without admitting guilt), his racist public assault on the Central Park Five, and his use of birtherism to propel himself into national politics. In a more recent spree, he questioned the intelligence of Representative Maxine Waters, LeBron James, and the CNN host Don Lemon—each of whom is black—and (again) assailed African-American football players.
The issue of whether Trump used the word in question is almost completely inconsequential, yet the fact that it does not matter is itself of great consequence. The elastic tolerance of the otherwise intolerable is the looming context in which Robert Mueller will deliver his expected reports on whether Trump obstructed justice as President or colluded with Russia in 2016. In matters of race, as well as competence, decency, character, and fitness, the public either already knows what it needs to know or intractably believes what it wishes to believe. Omarosa Manigault’s book is unlikely to change the balance of either.
Four days before Omarosa Manigault Newman‘s tell-all memoir is set to drop, a list of claims made by the Apprentice-contestant-turned-Trump-aide’s book are circling.
The release of Unhinged, about President Donald Trump‘s White House has been the center of controversy over a dispute about whether Manigault Newman’s allegations are legitimate.
In one particularly contested allegation in the tell-all book, which multiple news outlets have reported, Manigault Newman, who announced her resignation from the Trump administration in December 2017, claims a number or sources told her that Trump was repeatedly recorded using the “N-word.”
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying that the book “is riddled with lies and false accusations,” adding that “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.”
RELATED: Omarosa Manigault Claims There Are Tapes of Donald Trump Using the ‘N-Word’ During The Apprentice
Omarosa Manigault Newman and Donald Trump Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who said he was cited as one of Manigault Newman’s sources, tweeted his rejection of her claims.
“I’m in @Omarosa’s book on page 149. She claims to have heard from someone who heard from me that I heard Trump use the N-word. Not only is this flat-out false (I’ve never heard such a thing), but Omarosa didn’t even make an effort to call or email me to verify. Very shoddy work,” he tweeted.
Manigault Newman, however, says she recorded conversations she had with the president in the West Wing, according to The Daily Beast. In addition, The Washington Post listened to several of her tapes, confirming that quotations match the recordings recounted in the book excerpts.
RELATED: Omarosa Manigault Secretly Recorded Donald Trump and Played Tape for Others: Report
I’m in @Omarosa’s book on page 149. She claims to have heard from someone who heard from me that I heard Trump use the N-word. Not only is this flat-out false (I’ve never heard such a thing), but Omarosa didn’t even make an effort to call or email me to verify. Very shoddy work. — Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) August 10, 2018
Manigault Newman also alleges in her book that Trump’s campaign offered her a $15,000-per-month contract to stay silent after leaving the White House, The Washington Post reported. It is unclear exactly why the former Apprentice star left Trump’s team. At the time of her departure, Sanders issued a statement saying that Manigault Newman had resigned, but in February, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said that she had been fired.
Manigault Newman writes that the $15,000 offer came with a nondisclosure agreement, which The Post reviewed, stating that Manigault Newman could not say anything damaging to the president — including all comments about the president, vice president and their families. The contract said that she would be responsible for “diversity outreach,” among other things, The Post reported.
Manigault Newman also claims that Trump called Kellyanne Conway’s half-Filipino husband, George Conway, a “f—ing FLIP! Disloyal! F—ing Goo-goo,” according to Axios.
Additionally, the book asserts that the White House has a tanning bed. According to The Post, other White House aides said they have not seen the bed.
In another claim, Manigault Newman references her trip to Haiti, writing that Trump asked her “Why did you choose that s—– country as your first foreign trip?”
Unhinged hits newsstands Aug. 14.
Omarosa Manigault Newman became a household name playing the villain on Donald Trump’s hit reality television show, “The Apprentice.”
Interested in Trump Administration? Add Trump Administration as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Trump Administration news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest
And after being fired by President Trump's White House, she is now once again back in the spotlight and drawing their ire with her new book, "Unhinged."
As details of the book have emerged ahead of its release next week, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders issued a scathing statement calling Manigault Newman a “disgruntled former White House staffer” whose book is "riddled with lies and false accusations."
“Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations,” Sanders said.
“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,” she added.
Michael Reynolds/EPA via Rex/Shutterstock, FILE
According to The Guardian and the Washington Post, which both reviewed copies of the book, Manigault Newman accuses the president of being a “racist,” using the N-word, and in one situation, makes the claim that she saw Trump eat a piece of paper after privately consulting with his personal attorney Michael Cohen in the Oval Office.
“I saw him put a note in his mouth. Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive,” Manigault Newman speculates in the book, according to the Washington Post.
Manigault Newman, who was famously known to have tried to have her wedding photos shot at the White House and enjoyed relatively unfettered access to Trump as his high paid assistant and a liaison to the African American community, is raising eyebrows with her insider –- yet unverified -- accounts of life in the Trump White House.
Richard Drew/AP
After she left the White House, Manigault Newman said on "Good Morning America": “As the only African American woman in this White House, as a senior staff and assistant to the president, I have seen things that have made me uncomfortable, that have upset me, that have affected me deeply and emotionally, that has affected my community and my people.”
According to the Washington Post, Manigault Newman taped many of her private conversations at the White House, and in her book directly quotes from those tapings.
Manigault Newman claims the existence of recordings of Trump using racist terms like the N-word on the set of "The Apprentice," according to the Guardian, though she says she did not hear Trump use that word herself.
She later told NPR, however, that she had heard the president say that word.
"Hearing it changed everything for me," she told NPR, according to the story, which was published on Friday.
She also she has heard the president use racist words against George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.
“The allegation is not credible, and indeed is ridiculous, particularly in light of the timing of her departure from the White House—December 12, 2017," Conway tweeted. "It’s absurd all around.”
Another person quoted in the book, pollster Frank Luntz, also debunked her claim that he heard Trump use the N-word.
“She claims to have heard from someone who heard from me that I heard Trump use the N-word. Not only is this flat-out false (I’ve never heard such a thing), but Omarosa didn’t even make an effort to call or email me to verify. Very shoddy work,” Luntz wrote.
Manigault Newman is expected to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss her book ahead of a national book tour.
