Omarosa exposes rampant incompetence in Trump White House
Republican presidential candidate, former US President Donald Trump, attends trial at Manhattan Criminal Court May 13 2024 in New York City.
What you need to know:
- After Obama’s presidential victory in November 2008, Trump confessed to Omarosa of his hatred for Obama, questioning his nationality, citizenship, and the legitimacy of his Harvard academic credentials.
- After Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 presidential election, Trump made an impassioned stance to preserve white supremacy in the nation.
Omarosa Manigault Newman grew up in the violent inner-city Westlake projects of Youngstown in Ohio. She was raised by a widowed mother, who worked two jobs for 12 hours daily, to try and provide for Omarosa and her three siblings.
They survived on food-stamps, which were coloured tiny stamps of multiple denominations that were provided by the federal government to low-income families to purchase foodstuffs.
Sports imparted a reprieve and Omarosa got a volleyball scholarship to Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio. She savoured the opportunity by earning a bachelor’s in broadcast journalism and subsequently completed a compelling master’s in mass communication at Howard University in Washington DC.
While in DC, she became the esteemed recipient of the position of vice chair of the National Diversity Coalition in President Bill Clinton's Administration. She ended her tenure at the White House after President Clinton was impeached during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
One of her close friends, Kevin L. Jefferson, consequently informed her of a tantalising casting, soliciting contestants for the inaugural season of a reality TV show called The Apprentice and was scheduled to be hosted by real estate mogul, Donald Trump.
Omarosa's most integral decision was creating an audition tape, which she sent a day before the deadline date. She was subsequently invited for a rigorous interview and was eventually selected as one of the 16 contestants.
The Apprentice was a 40-day reality show, filmed within Trump Tower in New York City. Omarosa studied and observed Trump and noticed he loved conflict, chaos, and confusion, and gleefully enjoyed watching people argue and bicker.
She seamlessly adapted her structured boardroom strategy accordingly and replicated his desire for conflict. If she wasn't instigating fights she was impeding them, and she infamously coined the catchphrase “I’m not here to make friends.”
Trump was enamoured by her contagious enthusiasm. Her direct, provocative and controversial mentality embellished the show’s ratings and Omarosa was labelled a villain and the mainstream media dubbed her the show’s breakout star.
This title opened a prosperous door to wealth and career opportunities for her and her professional liaison with Trump advanced and he became her mentor and confidant.
After Obama’s irrepressible presidential victory in November 2008, Trump confessed to Omarosa of his hatred for Obama, questioning his nationality, citizenship, and the legitimacy of his Harvard academic credentials.
Harvard was publicly deemed superior to Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania that Trump had attended and Trump took offence to a black man rising to the pinnacle of American achievement.
Omarosa admits her complicity to Trump's prejudice in her memoir, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House, stating she had a blind spot towards Trump's digression, given her proximity to him.
Omarosa Newman's memoir, Unhinged.
His past disposition towards her, created an endearing figure in her conscience and she felt indebted to the opportunities he had confounded upon her. That reverence built a formidable sense of compassion, which avidly increased the ferocity of her loyalty.
After Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 presidential election, Trump made an impassioned stance to preserve white supremacy in the nation. The first action he enacted was employing a cabinet with a proven racist past during the transition. He appointed Steve Bannon, an anti-immigration rightist, Stephen Miller, a writer of college essays that rallied against blacks, and Jeff Sessions, who had a well-documented track record of supporting the Klu Klux Klan (KKK).
Diversity was compromised, the transitional team was painted whiter than a picket fence. Omarosa was the only black woman on the executive committee in a staff that was woefully unprepared, disorganised, overwhelmed and unqualified.
Thousands of appointees’ utter lack of experience primarily consisted of incognisant men who included Trump’s friends and business buddies, selected on loyalty over logic. They had never worked in DC before and had no idea how to efficiently operate a transition.
After Trump was sworn in as the 45 president of the US on January 20, 2017, he wasted no time dismantling Obama’s legacy. He signed an executive order aimed at repealing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which had provided nominal healthcare to over 30 million low-income citizens.
He then signed another executive order reinstating the Global Gag Rule that banned federal funding to any international health organisation that provided reproductive healthcare services to women.
Every governing department was stagnant, manpower was severely compromised and the lack of operation teams, stymied progress. The thousands of Schedule-C staff jobs that were supposed to be filled during the transition remained empty throughout Trump’s entire administration.
The deplorable state of governance was escalating. Trump wasn’t involved or aware of just how much had to be done, and how much wasn’t being accomplished. He spent most of his time in the Oval Office tweeting, watching Fox News, berating his staff with vulgarity and didn't read the daily briefings placed on his desk.
During briefings, Trump's attention was scattered. Omarosa states that he couldn't remember key points that had been discussed and couldn't retain any of the bulleted points and was repeatedly distracted.
When he gave speeches, he ad-libbed and had a pejorative way of going off script while uttering ignorant repulsive statements. Since working with him during
The Apprentice days, Omarosa knew Trump wasn't an avid reader.
While working with him concurrently, she'd understood that he read at an eighth-grade level, which was unacceptable for the leader of the US. The White House had decelerated from the monumental talent of Obama, a vast bookworm and eloquently knowledgeable intellect, to Trump, who was barely functionally literate and had no surface-level understanding of the pieces of legislation he signed into law.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff’s Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
