The White House finally rid itself of that incompetent, embarrassing reality TV star.
No, no, not that one. The other one. News that Omarosa Manigault Newman — that’s Minister Omarosa Manigault Newman to you, commoner — has left her post as director of communications at the White House Office of Public Liaison emerged Wednesday, causing Twitter to erupt in whatever 2017's version of "Bye, Felicia" happens to be.
The actual circumstances of the Honorable Omarosa Manigault’s departure, like her nature of her erstwhile role in Donald Trump’s White House, remain unclear. According to an email from Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, The Omarosa “resigned yesterday to pursue other opportunities” although “her departure will not be effective until Jan. 20, 2018.”
However, in the way of many twists that have occurred within this live reality series currently being hate-watched by much of the country, the official report doesn’t match those of eyewitnesses. Sources close to situation, quoted by CNN analyst and American Urban Radio Networks' White House correspondent April Ryan, say the former contestant on “The Apprentice” was escorted off the White House grounds.
“If Secret Service escorts you off the property, I can’t see her filling out her remainder [of her time] until January 20,” Ryan observed in a conversation with Wolf Blitzer and other CNN panelists that aired on Wednesday.
Trump’s approval rating hovers around 36.6 percent. But The Omarosa’s is far lower than that — in the single digits, probably. TV Guide named her as one of the 60 Nastiest TV Villains of All Time in 2013, an honor she shares with "The Simpsons" dastardly Mr. Burns and Red John, a fictional serial killer hunted over many seasons of “The Mentalist.” She is so intensely reviled that when Spike Lee clowned her in a searing Instagram post in July 2016, very few other than Manigault herself called on him to apologize. Her appearance on a panel at the 2017 National Association of Black Journalists conference in August proved to be such a contentious disaster than she slinked off the stage before it was over.
So when Doug Jones’ shocking victory over Roy Moore in Alabama’s highly contentious, racially-charged Senate race was attributed in large part to a massive turnout among African American voters, the people The Omarosa was tasked with wooing, she was ripest to be plucked and cast aside.
Ryan said the Omarosa’s departure was precipitated by a vulgarity-laced version of a quitting monologue before an audience of her former co-workers, including White House chief of staff John Kelly. It’s fun to imagine said soliloquy as an homage to Tom Cruise’s “Jerry Maguire” opus, only festooned with F-bombs and guest starring jackrabbit-quick Secret Service agents responding to the part where she said, “Who’s coming with me?”
Actually if the reports are accurate, The Omarosa didn’t have to say a word to earn such a prestigious escort. In response to being denied an audience with Trump, she attempted to enter the White House residence after Kelly cut off her walk-in access to the Oval Office. Protective agents were alerted and the rest, as they say, is sweet, sugar-coated schadenfreude.
“The sad piece about this is . . . that is not a place for things like that,” Ryan told Blitzer. “And we’ve never seen anything like that.” I beg to differ. We’ve seen such a thing plenty of times, on Bravo and NBC and Oxygen and elsewhere. Remember that in addition to being an alumnus of Trump’s former ego-stroking festival, she’s also appeared on “Fear Factor” and “Girls Behaving Badly.” Omarosa knows exactly how this game is played.
Any way you slice it, if Ryan’s version of events indeed happened, and previous exposure to The Omarosa disinclines us from doubting Ryan, the self-styled “Trumplican” is done reporting to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
Minister Manigault’s dismissal was inevitable from the moment she detached from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and latched herself to the Trump Train. Her titles of Director of African-American Outreach during Trump’s campaign and her nebulous-sounding White House title of Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison were illusory. And her overreaching signature on an invitation to the Congressional Black Caucus, when she styled herself as “the Honorable Omarosa Manigault,” was comedy platinum.
As such, her departure from this White House is only significant as TV entertainment, because she never occupied a more substantive role than the one she’s honed to brilliance since 2004: the empty, hated villain. She signed up to reprise that part from the moment she alloyed her fame to that of her prime-time television boss, as demonstrated in this famous quote from a pre-election episode of "Frontline" in which she declared with utter seriousness that “every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump.”
That memorable clip first aired in September 2016.
Cut back to Wednesday, December 13, 2017, when Ryan explained that The Omarosa’s exit was instigated for a reason familiar to any semi-regular viewer of Bravo's unscripted slate. “She’s leaving because General Kelly was tired of it,” Ryan told Blitzer. “He was tired of all the drama."
Using “The Apprentice” contestant’s religious title with emphasis (she was formally ordained a Baptist minister in 2012) Ryan described Minister Omarosa Manigault as “a mood changer for the president. She could get in his ear some kind of that a way [that] he could be happy, and then all of a sudden she’d point something out and his whole mood would change. He would lash out.”
Ryan reported that concerns about The Omarosa inviting guests attending her April wedding into the White House despite being forbidden to do so were also mentioned, as was the fact that, shockingly, she doesn’t get along with the new head of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities initiative.
A more significant factor leading to her pseudo-political downfall, Ryan said, was that many people wondered what she was doing for her $180,000 salary. “No one really knew.”
Not that it matters now or ever will again, but The Omarosa actually has previous White House experience, having worked in Vice President Al Gore’s office during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But that element of her professional life appears to inform little of who she is now. She’s a star and a player first, and everything else second.
One should also note that her main claim to fame, other that her extreme unlikability, is that she never wins. In the first “Apprentice” season, she came in eighth place. Trump inflicted her on audiences again anyway in 2008, when she exited at sixth place. In 2013, she walked the plank with a 10th place finish. In short, The Omarosa is the quintessential Trumpian, boastful of her success but is inconveniently hitched to a public track record of failure. She’s also quotable — much to her detriment as it turns out — and that means she’s not going to disappear anytime soon.
Freshly re-released into the wild, The Omarosa will likely migrate through the hotter, rockier climes of various talk shows who will have her before attempting to settle back into her familiar habitat of reality television.
Where she’ll end up is anyone’s guess, since her prior association with Trump the Reality Television Host merely made her toxic. Her stint as a surrogate to Trump, the least-popular president in modern history, makes her outright radioactive. In previous seasons that would make The Omarosa perfect material for Oxygen’s “Bad Girls Club” but that show, like her political career, also came to an end in 2017.
She is free to pursue other opportunities.
Watch what happens, live.
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