Former aide says Donald Trump is a ‘racist’ who ‘uses the N-word’ repeatedly
Omarosa Manigault Newman writes in new memoir that she witnessed ‘truly appalling things’
Omarosa Manigault Newman at one time the most prominent African American in Donald Trump’s White House has claimed that the US President is a “racist” who has “used the N-word” repeatedly.
Trump used the racial slur “multiple times” during the making of his reality TV show The Apprentice and there is a tape to prove it, according to Manigault Newman, citing three unnamed sources.
Manigault Newman “rose to fame as a recurring character on The Apprentice, and parlayed that into a prestigious gig in the former reality star’s administration”, says Mediaite.
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Critics “have previously questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility and are likely to accuse her of seeking revenge against the administration after her abrupt dismissal last December”, says The Guardian.
In her book, Unhinged, to be published next week, the former Apprentice contestant insists that the reports about Trump using the N-word are true, although she does not say she heard him use the word herself.
She also claims that she personally witnessed Trump use racial epithets about the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway, who is half Filipino. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! F**king Goo-goo.”
Both flip and goo-goo “are terms of racial abuse for Filipinos”, notes The Guardian.
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In the book she writes that during her time in Trump’s administration she experienced a “growing realisation 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 says.
Recalling her sudden and unceremonious departure, she writes: “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.”
Manigault Newman’s is the second memoir from a former Trump administration member, following that of the ex-press secretary Sean Spicer, but hers is expected to cause more issues for the president than Spicer’s.
Earlier this week The Daily Beast reported that she had “secretly recorded conversations with the president and leveraged this while seeking a book deal”.
The tapes will be important says Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent at CNN because “if Trumpworld attacks her when the book comes out... perhaps by downplaying her relationship with Trump... she'll be able to point to the tapes as proof that she WAS in the room with him”, he writes.
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