Omarosa claims she heard recordings of Donald Trump making racist remarks
Omarosa Manigault-Newman might be done working for Donald Trump, but when it comes to rehashing their relationship, she’s just getting started. In her forthcoming tell-all, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, the president’s former confidante claims he is a “racist” who has used the N word repeatedly, and that there’s proof. However, her story has been changing.
Since 2016, rumors have been swirling about outtakes from The Apprentice in which Trump uses offensive language, but Manigault-Newman expounds on the purported contents of the recordings in Unhinged.
According to the Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release next week, the first-season Apprentice contestant “insists that the reports are true.” She details learning about outtakes from the former NBC reality show. She also says she recorded conversations with him during her brief tenure in the White House.
Regarding the outtakes, Manigault-Newman cites three anonymous sources and confirms that the future U.S. president was caught on mic using the N word “multiple times” during the taping of The Apprentice.
Actor Tom Arnold and former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt made similar allegations against Trump before Manigault-Newman, and were among the first to speak about the outtakes.
Manigault-Newman thinks her knowledge of the tapes is what got her fired from the White House in December 2017. “Three sources in three separate conversations had described the contents of this tape,” the Guardian quotes her book. “They all told me that President Trump hadn’t just dropped a single N word bomb. He’d said it multiple times throughout the show’s taping during off-camera outtakes, particularly during the first season of The Apprentice.” She informed former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who she believes told the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. When Kelly learned how close she was getting to acquiring the tapes, she believes “this gave him cause to terminate her job, though he found a different pretext,” the Guardian reports.
Her exit must have given her even more fervor; four months later, she continued speaking to her Apprentice source. “I was told exactly what Donald Trump said — yes, the N word and others in a classic Trump-goes-nuclear rant — and when he said them. During production he was on mic, and there is definitely an audio track,” she writes.
But during an interview with NPR on Friday, Manigault-Newman gave conflicting information about the recordings, claiming she actually heard the tape with her own ears.
“Hearing it changed everything for me,” Manigault-Newman said. She was then pressed by NPR’s Rachel Martin about the discrepancy. In her book, she only says that she was told what Trump said. Martin asked Manigault-Newman if she actually heard the tape, and she said, “I did.”
“I heard the president of the United States use not only the N word but, as Bill Pruitt described during that interview, other horrible things, during the production of The Apprentice.” NPR claims she never admits to hearing the tape in Unhinged, but it’s possible she does mention hearing him use racial slurs firsthand while filming the reality show.
These inconsistencies could make many doubt her claims. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is already a disbeliever. “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,” she said in a statement.
“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.”
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which owns the rights to the reality TV show, and Mark Burnett, the show’s creator, have declined to release any unaired Apprentice footage because of “various contractual and legal requirements.”
However, Manigault-Newman evidently has her own proof. During her time working as the director of communications for the White House office of public liaison, she had secretly recorded conversations with the president and “leveraged” this while seeking a book deal, according to the Daily Beast.
In her memoir, she writes that while working for him, she felt a “growing realization that Donald Trump was indeed a racist, a bigot and a misogynist. My certainty about the N-word tape and his frequent uses of that word were the top of a high mountain of truly appalling things I’d experienced with him, during the last two years in particular.” She continues, “It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist. Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”
She recalls a time when he shamed her for wanting to go to Haiti. “‘Why did you choose that sh***y country as your first foreign trip? … You should have waited until the confirmations were done and gone to Scotland and played golf at [his course] Turnberry,” Trump told her, according to the Guardian.
In her book, she also considers the idea that he may really want to start a race war, and says “the bricks in his racist wall kept getting higher.”
Manigault-Newman also claims that she witnessed Trump use racial slurs about White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s half-Filipino husband, George Conway. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! F***ing Goo-goo.” “Flip” and “goo-goo” are considered offensive terms for Filipinos.
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. It’s absurd all around.
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) August 10, 2018
However, George Conway doesn’t buy it. “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,” he tweeted today, in response to that excerpt. “It’s absurd all around.”
She also notes the sexism she experienced on the set of The Apprentice. Referring to female contestants, she says Trump asked questions like “What do you think she’s like in bed?,” “Do you think she’s sexy?” and “Who you think would be better in bed between the two of them?”
[UPDATED at 2:59 p.m. PT with her statements to NPR and Sanders’s statement.]
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