Omarosa Manigault-Newman has reportedly been fired — this time from her actual job in the Trump White House and not from a contrived one on The Apprentice.
And according to some accounts, her dismissal from the White House had all the drama — and then some — one would expect when a reality TV star president and his staff fire a political aide who served not once but three times as the villain on said reality show.
The White House has been tight-lipped about Manigault-Newman’s departure, saying in a statement only that she resigned her position “to pursue other opportunities,” effective January 20, 2018, the one year-anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration. “We wish her the best in future endeavors and are grateful for her service,” the statement read.
The president also tweeted his thanks and well wishes Wednesday night:
Thank you Omarosa for your service! I wish you continued success.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2017
But Manigault-Newman’s exit might have involved a bit more acrimony. A White House official told the Wall Street Journal that Manigault-Newman was “physically dragged and escorted off the campus.” American Urban Radio Network’s April D. Ryan (who has a history with Manigault-Newman) reported that it all began when Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, fired Manigault-Newman on Tuesday night.
Manigault-Newman did not take the news well, according to Ryan, and insisted on speaking with the president. Kelly allegedly told her that Trump had already signed off, and that this was not like “going to the principal’s office.”
Ryan says she was told that Manigault-Newman lobbed a few curses — and tried to take credit for delivering the black vote to President Trump.
Okay the White House still contends Omarosa signed a resignation letter. But Gen Kelly Kicked her out will high drama with the Minister offering vulgarities and curse words as she was escorted out of the building and off campus
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) December 13, 2017
Manigault-Newman also apparently had no intention of going quietly. After being dismissed by Kelly, she allegedly walked over the residence to try to get in and see the president. According to Ryan, the Secret Service stopped her. (The Secret Service denied that it had escorted Manigault-Newman off the premises.)
Manigault-Newman gave her own account on Wednesday morning, in an interview with Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan. She told Strahan she resigned, and denied that she was fired, that she had tried to enter the residence, and that had been escorted off White House grounds. She instead recalled her “candid” conversation with John Kelly in the situation room. “I like to hear all of these interesting tales, but I have to tell you, they’re 100 percent false,” she said, adding that, if it were true, “Where are the pictures or videos?”
.@Omarosa says Chief of Staff John Kelly "brought order" to the West Wing, but did not restrict her access to Pres. Trump. "Certainly I had more access than most, and people had problems with that." https://t.co/mJGEMlZfFG pic.twitter.com/fBuyCTScrN
— Good Morning America (@GMA) December 14, 2017
She confirmed her last day of work in this “very interesting” administration would be January 20.
Trump and Manigault-Newman had a close relationship, beginning with her days on The Apprentice and leading up to her work on his campaign and in his administration.
But tensions existed for some time between Kelly and Manigault-Newman, and Trump’s chief of staff had reportedly tried to curtail some of her influence and access to the president. It sounds like he succeeded on Tuesday night.
It’s hard to argue that Manigault-Newman, who was nominally tasked with African-American outreach during the campaign and administration, was much of a success in the White House. Several reports during her tenure suggested few even knew what she was doing there. But she also had her work cut out for her. It wouldn’t have been easy to build bridges to the black community with Trump perpetually burning them behind her.
How Omarosa went from The Apprentice to the White House
Manigault-Newman earned a degree in journalism and a master’s degree from Howard University, but she’s mostly been a professional reality TV star, most famously with her stint as a contestant on the debut season of Trump’s The Apprentice in 2004. Manigault-Newman, who went by the name Omarosa, didn’t win, but she nonetheless became the show’s notorious villain.
Omarosa appeared on two more versions of The Apprentice: Celebrity Apprentice in 2007 and again on an all-stars version of the show in 2013. She was fired two more times.
She also worked on a short-lived reality TV show in 2010 with Trump called The Ultimate Merger. Despite the businesslike title, it was actually a dating reality show executive produced by Trump, where Omarosa courted 12 potential suitors in Las Vegas. Somehow, the show got canceled after a year, but BuzzFeed’s Darren Sands said their partnership on this show helped seal Manigault-Newman’s loyalty to Trump.
Manigault-Newman had some experience in politics: a short tenure in the government during the Clinton administration, where she started as an assistant in Vice President Al Gore’s office, answering the veep’s invitations. According to People, she held four jobs in two years, including at the White House personnel office.
She eventually bounced to the Commerce Department, where, in her last position in 2000, a former undersecretary described her as “disruptive” and recalled “she was asked to leave as quickly as possible.”
But she reemerged as Trump started his presidential run, eventually serving as director of African-American outreach for the campaign in the summer of 2016. Her primary task involved building up support among African Americans for Trump — a candidate who once told black voters they should elect him because “What do you have to lose?”
The RNC seemed skeptical of Manigault-Newman and the Trump campaign’s efforts, hiring three strategists to amp up outreach in August 2016. According to NBC News, the RNC had seen the Trump campaign’s outreach to be both informal and “plagued by canceled events.”
Manigault-Newman had high ambitions for her role, telling the Times in October 2016 that “Romney and McCain got around 6 to 7 percent of the African-American vote. Our goal is to get 15 to 20 percent of the African-American vote, and we still think that number is possible.”
It wasn’t. Trump ended up with 8 percent of black voters, compared to Clinton’s 88 percent, according to Pew Research.
Trump claims to value loyalty above all else, and when he moved into the White House, he brought Manigault-Newman, the perpetual foil from his reality TV days. Like Trump, Manigault-Newman had a penchant for the bombastic: In a September 2016 interview, she said, “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump.”
Nobody really knew what Manigault-Newman did at the White House
Manigault-Newman spent a year as the director of communications in the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, focusing, as she did during the campaign, on outreach to the black community. Some black Republicans saw Manigault-Newman as an important liaison to an administration that lacked minority representation. The president did appear to defer to her on African-American issues, according to a BuzzFeed report from March, though some black GOPers felt she had frozen them out of the administration.
But day to day, reports from the White House suggest she often became embroiled in dramatic, reality TV-esque scenarios — and didn’t appear to have a strong grasp on her White House role.
- Two people close to the administration told the Times she stumbled early on, failing to find enough attendees to attend a White House Black History Month celebration — an event she said would be “extravagant” but became better known for Trump’s Frederick Douglass gaffe.
- In an interview with the Daily Beast, she described her portfolio as including “everything,” but did not give specifics.
- A Republican close to the White House said he had “no clue” what her job was. The Washington Post asked the White House to clarify her responsibilities in March, but got no response.
- She feuded with April D. Ryan, a White House reporter and former friend, in February, after Ryan claimed Manigault-Newman had threatened her and a “dossier” existed with dirt on her. (Manigault called it “fake news,” and then later said she had a recording of their heated exchange.)
- She reportedly asked if she could hold a reception at the White House for her wedding and, although she did not hold the party there, she brought her 39-person bridal party for a White House photo shoot. Politico reported it was unclear whether she had permission, because a slew of senior aides were never briefed; either way, she wasn’t allowed to release the pictures.
- Compounding the problem, according to media reports, the entire liaison office was barely functional: It was described as a “dumpster fire place to work” and an “island of misfit toys.” (The director of the office, a Reince Priebus ally, left in August.)
Eventually, John Kelly had had enough
All of this — the reality TV-style drama, the unfettered access to the president — reportedly did not win Manigault-Newman additional fans in the White House. The Times reports that she was not well-liked among others in Trump’s inner circle, including Kelly and Jared Kushner. And while Kelly has evidently failed to control Trump himself, he’d reportedly wanted to push out Manigault-Newman for some time, or at least curb her influence.
A Daily Beast article from September said Kelly considered Manigault-Newman “patient zero” when it came clamping down on aides’ unfettered access to the president. According to the report, Manigault-Newman would often bring Trump “unvetted” articles that would both anger and distract him — including a story about the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe that might have helped spark this summer’s feud with hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.
After Kelly fired her, Manigault-Neman reportedly tried to confront Trump at his residence, but the Daily Beast reported that staff stopped her from reaching the president. “It was actually the closest thing to reality TV [I’d experienced] since getting here,” a White House official told the outlet.
Sources say General Kelly did the firing and Omarosa is alleged to have acted very vulgar and cursed a lot and said she helped elect President Trump. The word is a General Kelly had it and got rid of her.
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) December 13, 2017
Manigault-Newman denied the accounts of a verbal altercation with Kelly, and those that suggested she had been escorted away from the White House. “I resigned and I didn’t do that in the residence, as being reported,” she said on Good Morning America Wednesday. “John Kelly and I sat down in the situation room, which is a very secure, very quiet room in the White House and we had a very candid conversation.”
She called any other accounts “completely false, unverified reporting,” and said that a reporter — meaning Ryan — had a personal “vendetta” against her.
Cryptic hints at tensions on issues of race
Nevertheless, Manigault-Newman hinted at some of her tension with the president’s chief of staff, and others close to the president. “I stand out, I’m the only African-American women who sits at the table with those 30 assistants to the presidents, and we all had to adjust to his very militaristic style,” she said, referring to Kelly, who tried to impose some order on a chaotic White House.
She added that, given her relationship with Trump, she “certainly I had more access than most, and people had problems with that.”
On GMA, Manigault-Newman also hinted at other reports that suggested it was she who had grown disillusioned with her role in the White House — and with the administration’s often incoherent positions on sensitive racial issues, from the NFL protests to Trump’s feud with LaVar Ball.
“She struggled with being an African-American senior staffer, with all the racial incidents in the White House, and I think it was starting to weigh on her,” a White House official told BuzzFeed, who also said Manigault-Newman had considered leaving after Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests in August.
This explanation could simply be the desired spin on the exit of Manigault-Newman, and those close to her. But it’s fair to say that she had her work cut out for her from the beginning.
Since he took office, Trump has said that there were good people on “both sides” at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, relentlessly picked fights with black celebrities, and devoted inordinate amounts of time and attention to NFL players’ protests. His approval with African Americans was just 14 percent when he took office. It’s now down to 7 percent. It’s hard to imagine anything Manigault-Newman could have done to fix that.
When Strahan asked her about these issues, Manigault-Newman offered a tantalizing, “stay-tuned-for-the-next-episode” of an answer. “There were a lot of things that I observed during the last year that I was very unhappy with, that I was very uncomfortable,” she said, declining to go into detail because her White House work would continue until January 20.
“But when I have a chance to tell my story — quite a story tell — 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 affected me deeply and emotionally that has affected my community and my people,” she said.