What Orwell anticipated would become a reality: the alternative world of #SpicerFacts.
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THE TRUMPLICAN
Omarosa Manigault
Assistant to the President
Back in the day when Kellyanne Conway was one of Donald Trump’s most effective critics on the cable-TV circuit, she clashed on CNN with Omarosa Manigault, one of the most persistent of Trump’s apologists.
Things got so crazy on that March 2016 evening that Don Lemon, the host of CNN Tonight, had Omarosa’s microphone silenced so he could regain control of a discussion about Donald Trump ridiculing the looks of Heidi Cruz, the wife of Texas senator Ted Cruz, who had emerged as the most serious of Trump’s challengers for the Republican presidential nomination.
Conway kept trying to turn the discussion toward the damage Trump did to his own campaign when he made crude and sexist remarks. “Women are telling pollsters they don’t appreciate a leader who has to get the last word all the time and says certain things,” said Conway, who at the time identified herself as the head of “the largest pro-Cruz super-PAC.”
But Omarosa, who usually goes by her first name, was not going there. She kept coming back to the clash between the candidates and to defending Trump as a stand-up guy who had every right to let rip on the Cruz family.
“Let’s be honest about who created this mess!” demanded Conway, identifying Trump as the wrongdoer. Then she brought up Cruz’s two young daughters and imagined them searching their mother’s name on the Internet. “What do you want them to find? To see?” asked Conway.
“When they Google it, they’re going to see that… Daddy, you haven’t really been playing by the rules,” snapped Omarosa, as she ticked off complaints about Cruz.
“I gave you a nice softball and you struck it out,” said an exasperated Conway.
Omarosa shot back: “I’m going to speak my truth and you will never control that.”
A few months later, Conway and Omarosa found themselves on the same Trump campaign team—Conway at the direction of the billionaire Mercer family, which funded her super PAC; Omarosa because Trump was her ticket back to the White House where she had once served as a Democrat. Now they work together in the Trump White House, though their roles are reversed. Conway is the no-holds-barred Trump defender, griping about reporters and promising to deliver alternative facts. Omarosa, if her job description is to be believed, is the one bringing people together around ideas and policy initiatives.
Unfortunately, Omarosa Manigault’s assignment isn’t going any more smoothly than Kellyanne Conway’s.
Three days before Christmas, at the close of 2016, Trump named Conway to serve as a White House counselor, an ill-defined position in which the veteran campaigner was, in the president’s words, charged with providing “amazing insights on how to effectively communicate our message.”
Omarosa was named a few days later as assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison. Omarosa had announced before her selection for the job that she would have a “huge” position in the new White House. While the Public Liaison office may not be the State Department, it’s important. And her posting was not welcomed by everyone in the White House. “To the consternation of the president’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and others, Trump has given her the same title of presidential assistant as Mr. Priebus and other senior aides—and regularly includes her in high-level strategy sessions on the budget and other matters,” noted the New York Times.
“She is the highest-ranking African-American in the White House, and she has the ear of the president,” Paris Dennard, who served as former President George W. Bush’s director of outreach to African Americans, says of Omarosa. “That’s a good thing.” Some of the time.
For a very long time, white male presidents from both parties have sought insight and counsel regarding relations with racial and ethnic minorities. Frederick Douglass met with and counseled President Lincoln during the Civil War. Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed dozens of African Americans to key positions in his “New Deal” administration and formed a Federal Council of Negro Affairs (known as the “Black Cabinet”) to advise him during the Great Depression and World War II. A member of the council, Robert Clifton Weaver, would be appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as the first secretary of housing and urban development and the first African American cabinet member. Since the 1970s, presidents have tended to have more diverse cabinets. But cabinet members have often been less influential than White House aides and allies such as Bill Clinton’s “First Friend,” Vernon Jordan, and Valerie Jarrett, who served Barack Obama as assistant to the president for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs during the administration of the nation’s first African American president.
While Omarosa has more political background than many Trump picks, it was not universally seen as impressive. She was, according to a 2004 People magazine profile, “banished from four jobs in two years with the Clinton administration.”
“Ms Manigault, 43, has no policy experience, a spotty history in her previous federal positions and a resume that has cast her—inaccurately—as a university professor and a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore,” observed the New York Times in an article headlined “Prerequisite for Key White House Posts: Loyalty, Not Experience.” Along with Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization lawyer now charged with forging peace in the Middle East and sorting out relations with Cuba, and Keith Schiller, a former part-time security guard at Trump Tower (and later Trump Organization director of security) who now serves as the director of Oval Office operations, Omarosa was featured as an example of how the White House is “peppered with assistants and advisers whose principal qualification is their long friendship with Mr. Trump and his family.”
“Manigault, whose star turn on ‘The Apprentice’ propelled the show’s breakout first season, is now among about two dozen aides with the rank of assistant to the president—and one of the few with walk-in privileges for the Oval Office,” explained the Times. The key phrase there was “star turn on ‘The Apprentice.’” That’s what brought her into Trump’s orbit.
A combative figure on Trump’s pioneering program, Omarosa was, according to Time magazine, “booted off The Apprentice in Week 9, but that was only the beginning of her reality-TV career.” Trump knew a good villain when he saw one, so he invited her onto the program Celebrity Apprentice and then fired her again. Though she attempted other gigs, Omarosa owed her fame and fortune to Trump, and when he veered into presidential politics in 2015, she abandoned her Democratic roots and declared herself to be a “Trumplican.”
Omarosa’s appointment as “African-American Outreach” director for the Trump campaign did not impress Trump critics like filmmaker Spike Lee, who posted an off-center image of the reality-
TV star with the message “Trump has named her his ‘director of African-American Outreach.’ You might know her from Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice. Who’s next? Step N’ Fetchit? Aunt Jemina? Uncle Ben? Sleep N’ Eat? Rastus? Lil’ (N-word) Jim? Omarosa gonna give out free Popeye’s Chicken with sides to deliver [the] black vote to Trump? YA-DIG? SHO-NUFF. #blacklivesmatter.” Omarosa accused the Do the Right Thing director of race-baiting.
Despite Omarosa’s efforts, African American voters did not flock to Trump. According to the NBC News post-election analysis: “With blacks, exit polls show Trump claimed 8 percent of the vote to the previous Republican nominee’s 6 percent.” Trump failed to match the double-digit finishes of Republicans like George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and there was no indication that he was renewing the historic “Party of Lincoln” appeal.
So Omarosa had her White House work cut out for her. But there were immediate questions about whether she was steering the Trump train in the right direction. “Trump respects Manigault, and in turn, she will defend him to the exclusion of all else—a trait on display in recent tense, borderline-explosive interactions w
ith the press,” explained BuzzFeed political writer Darren Sands, in a perceptive assessment of Omarosa’s role in some of the new administration’s early stumbles.
MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid noted that “Omarosa is seen by many as the force behind Trump’s arguably clumsy attempts to reach across the racial aisle.” Reid pointed in particular to “the Black History Month kick-off in the Roosevelt Room, where we were treated to The Donald’s delighted discovery of Frederick Douglass and where blinged-out Cleveland pastor Darrell Scott publicly negotiated between the ‘top gang thugs’ and the White House. And who can forget Trump’s awkward visit to the Smithsonian’s new African American History and Culture museum, where he once again used his public remarks to boast about his diminutive Electoral College victory and, when confronted with artifacts of American slavery, apparently remarked ‘boy, that’s not good’?”
Omarosa even rubbed African American Republicans the wrong way. “See what’s happening right now, ladies and gentlemen—and people need to understand this very clearly—is black Republicans and black conservatives are being frozen out of the Trump administration by Omarosa Manigault,” veteran Republican activist Ralph Chittams explained on his radio show. “I’m saying it. I’m going on record. It’s going to cause me some problems, but this nonsense needs to stop and it needs to stop yesterday.”
Darren Sands suggested that Omarosa had set herself up as a gatekeeper whose controlling nature reinforced the worst instincts of her boss. “The reality is that if you are black, or concerned with issues affecting black America, with black politics, policy, or culture, Manigault is the person standing between you and the president of the United States,” Sands explained. “Trump, in fact, said it himself. Last month at the White House’s African American listening session, he listened to one person after another speak about their priorities. According to a source in the room, Trump twice asked people to follow up with Manigault. At one juncture, he pointed his thumbs outward—one at Trump loyalist Lynne Patton, and the other at Manigault. ‘You talk to them,’ he said.”
The problem is that, when people do try to talk with Omarosa, they are hit with a loyalty test. Omarosa is not always as extreme as she appeared to be in a PBS Frontline documentary on the Trump campaign, which featured her declaring: “Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump: it’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.” But keen observers see little evidence that Omarosa is immune to the “get even” bitterness that infects Trump’s inner circle.
“Omarosa, like Trump, brings high drama with her to the White House,” observes Joy-Ann Reid. That’s clearly true. And that’s clearly a problem. The best aides to presidents, especially those charged with the work of easing tensions with groups that did not support their boss’s election, recognize the full meaning of the “Outreach” title. It is not their job simply to push the administration line; it is their job to open up lines of communication. They know that they serve their president best by connecting him with people who come from outside his circle of acquaintance and, at least sometimes, from outside his comfort zone. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be Omarosa’s style. “Omarosa,” suggests Reid, “is like Trump in the way she relates to the world: as a collection of people for and against her.” Unfortunately, being like Trump does nothing to make Trump a better man, or a better president.
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THE HYPOCRITE WHO MADE HIS PARTY OF LINCOLN THE PARTY OF TRUMP
Mitch McConnell
Senate Majority Leader
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell began his exceptionally long Capitol Hill career in the summer of 1963, when he was working as an intern for a Republican congressman from Kentucky. On August 28 of that year, he left the office to watch the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Recalling that he was “overcome by the sight of the crowd, which stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument,” McConnell would later write that “I was too far away to hear Dr. King, but I knew I was witnessing a pivotal moment in history.” Though he had grown up in “Jim Crow” Alabama, McConnell recalled that his family opposed segregation and wrote that he had known from an early age “that everyone deserved equal opportunities and a right to vote.”
As a young man, Mitch McConnell wanted to be on the right side of history. After he left that first congressional office in which he had served a congressman who had opposed civil rights, McConnell asked for a position with one of the lions of the Senate: Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper. It happened that McConnell worked with Cooper, an old-school liberal Republican, during the remarkable era when the senator championed enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
McConnell has spoken and written at great length about how he was inspired by Cooper’s steady support of civil rights legislation in the 1960s: “Despite the considerable opposition from back home, Senator Cooper never wavered.” In his own memoir, McConnell hailed Senator Cooper’s long and courageous record of advancing “racial equality for every American citizen.”
Cooper did, indeed, act as a “profile in courage” senator when he rallied fellow Republicans to support civil rights legislation, with the argument that it was their historic and moral duty as members of the “Party of Lincoln.” History well records that the courageous Kentuckian played a critical role in organizing most of his party’s caucus to vote with liberal Democrats to avert the stalling tactics of segregationist Democrats, and their conservative Republican allies, so that the Senate could finally speak on behalf of civil rights.
McConnell has always celebrated Cooper’s legacy of statesmanship, recognizing the senator’s courageous advocacy for opening up a real debate on racial justice.
Yet, when a fellow senator invoked the memory of past struggles on behalf of racial equality by reading the words of Coretta Scott King on February 7, 2017, McConnell rushed to the floor of the Senate and silenced her.
During the Senate debate on the nomination of Alabama senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to serve as Donald Trump’s attorney general, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren referred to portions of a letter written three decades earlier by Coretta Scott King in opposition to the nomination of Sessions to serve as a federal judge. In that letter, the widow of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. recalled how Sessions had as a U.S. attorney prosecuted voting rights activists in Alabama and wrote: “Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts.”
There was no question that what Coretta Scott King wrote was true. The courts had slapped Sessions down, as had the Republican-
controlled Senate Judiciary Committee that rejected the Sessions nomination in 1986. Nor was there any question that Senator Warren was accurately recalling struggles that extended from an era that McConnell claims in his autobiography “changed the course of my life.”
Yet, as Warren was recalling King’s words on that Tuesday evening in the first weeks of the Trump interregnum, McConnell interrupted her and objected that “the senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama.”
A shocked Warren responded: “I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate. I ask leave of the Senate to continue my remarks.” Asserting that the senator who holds the seat once occupied by Edward Kennedy had “violated Senate rules against assailing the reputation of a colleague,” McConnell objected. Warren appealed but Montana senator Steve Daines, who was chairing the Senate session, interrupted her and announced: “Objection is heard. The senator will take her seat.”
A pair of party-line votes sustained McConnell’s draconian interpretation of the rules, which if taken to its logical conclusion could effectively silence meaningful debate on any presidential nominee who is
a sitting senator.
The majority leader made no apologies for barring Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and former vice president of the American Law Institute, from further participation in the Senate debate on whether to make Sessions the next attorney general of the United States. (McConnell’s Republicans and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin eventually cast fifty-two votes to confirm the Alabaman, while Warren and the rest of the Democratic caucus voted no.)
McConnell claimed that Warren had to be silenced because “she was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Those words were immediately embraced by Warren and her supporters as a badge of honor.
For McConnell, however, there was no honor. The man who held the seat once occupied by his mentor and hero, John Sherman Cooper, had used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to silence the recollection of Coretta Scott King’s warning that entrusting Jeff Sessions to uphold the rule of law would have “a devastating effect… on the progress we have made toward fulfilling my husband’s dream.”
Mitch McConnell shamed himself and the Senate that Tuesday night. It was not the first shaming of Mitch McConnell, the man who once championed campaign finance reform but became Washington’s most ardent advocate for the big money that distorts our discourse and dominates our politics. McConnell has a long history of hypocrisy, and of using his legislative skills and connections to achieve nefarious results in a chamber he claims to revere. That makes McConnell an able ally for Donald Trump; perhaps the ablest ally that Trump has in all of Washington.