Report: Omarosa Blocked a Potential Rival from the White House Like It Was an Episode of The Apprentice
From her earliest days of pseudo-fame Omarosa Manigault Newman, the world’s most successful Apprentice contestant (non-Celebrity division), displayed a preternatural understanding of certain rules of reality TV, chief amongst them: keep the camera on you at all costs and do what you can to cut those who might tempt it away. (She adapted the skill set for her recent time on Celebrity Big Brother, where she promoted her upcoming tell-all.) Per Politico's podcast Women Rule on Tuesday, Omarosa also used a variation of the tactic during her time in the White House before it ended late last year.
Per Politico, Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James said in the interview that she had been blocked from working in the White House by Omarosa. James, who has worked on the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, said she was looking forward to helping the Trump administration focus on illegal immigration, which Trump continued to make clear is a priority in his State of the Union address. But she was not allowed in because, as James puts it, Omarosa was treating the whole of Washington like The Apprentice—attempting to eliminate whomever she could.
“If he was serious about getting those things done—and I believed him to be, and I still do believe that he is—then I saw an opportunity to do things that perhaps hadn’t existed in a Republican administration before,” James told Politico. “I was very looking forward to an opportunity to serve in that White House in some capacity to help maybe on domestic policy, maybe in the Office of Public Liaison—in any of those capacities to get the job done.” She had originally led his transition staff but was not welcomed into the administration after the Trump inauguration. “It was Omarosa,” she told the podcast host Anna Palmer.
After the Manigault Newman departure, James was suddenly welcomed. “The day she left, the doors of the White House flung open, and they said, ‘Come,’ ” James said. She said she got a text that day from an unnamed person that said, “Kay in. O out.” She did not say what her position might be in the White House, should she be offered one.
Manigault Newman, who did not respond to a request from Politico, has not been shy about sharing her every post-White House reflection, telling her Big Brother castmates that when she left the White House she had been “freed off a plantation.”
Manigault Newman’s fellow former White House staffer Sean Spicer, however, seemed to have little sympathy for her when he spoke to Vanity Fair at the Champions of Jewish Values International Awards Gala last Thursday.
“I think you should read my book,” he said, in a clear attempt to remind the world that he is indeed not the only former Trump staffer to be sharing his tome of tales. “I think—look. I wish Omarosa the best, and I hope she finds a purpose. But I think Sarah [Huckabee Sanders] said it best. She’s moved on, and I think that’s probably best for the administration, and I hope she finds something meaningful to do.”
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