Omarosa Manigault-Newman stopped by Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on Tuesday night, where she told host Trevor Noah that she was “not trolling” the Trump administration by selectively leaking recordings of alleged conversations in the White House and on the 2016 campaign trail.
When Noah asked the former White House aide what her strategy was in leaking “singles” rather than “the entire album,” Manigault-Newman responded indirectly, generally indicating that her strategy is to release recordings when it will verify the content of the book.
“I’ll be honest, when [Trump campaign national spokesperson] Katrina Pierson came out and made that long statement that she had never had a conversation related to the N-word tape … I was sitting back going, ‘Really?’ … And so I did, I decided to share it to expose her, [then Eric Trump’s assistant] Lynne Patton, [chief spokesman] Jason Miller and the Trump campaign because there was a lot of talk about this N-word tape that so many people are pursuing and that folks refuse to release,” said Manigault-Newman. “But I’m not trolling them. I just want them to know that everything that you see in Unhinged, that’s quoted, can be verified as documented and corroborated.”
Manigault-Newman has been on an explosive press tour in the past week for her book, Unhinged, which was released Tuesday. In the memoir, made available to some publications early, she alleges that Donald Trump said the N-word multiple times while taping his reality show The Apprentice and that she witnessed him using racial epithets to refer to Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway.
After the White House denied the book’s contents as “lies” and “false accusations,” Manigault-Newman released three recordings, one allegedly portraying White House chief of staff John Kelly firing her; another in which Trump supposedly tells his former adviser that he didn’t know of her dismissal; and a third in which Katrina Pierson and Lynne Patton purportedly discuss rumored Apprentice tapes in which Trump says the N-word.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump called Manigault-Newman, a three-time contestant on The Apprentice and former friend, a “dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife” on Twitter. Later in the day, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is filing an arbitration claim that argues Manigault-Newman’s press tour and book violate a 2016 confidentiality agreement she signed.
When asked if she was worried about Trump’s retaliation, Omarosa was not coy: “If you see me in a fight with a bear, pray for the bear.”
Noah asked Manigault-Newman if she had advice, after knowing Trump for 15 years, on what makes him tick and how she’d go about taking him down. She responded, “There’s one way to shut Donald Trump down: just don’t give him the oxygen … if you ignore him you starve him of the thing he loves the most which is controversy and attention.”
As of Tuesday night, Unhinged was ranked ninth on Amazon.com’s best-seller book list.
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