Omarosa Manigault Newman is criticizing former boss Donald Trump for his “Black jobs” comment at this week’s debate.
Trump’s remarks arrived as he slammed President Joe Biden on the hot-button issue of immigration. The former president argued that “the millions of people he’s allowed to come in through the border, they’re taking Black jobs.”
But in an interview with TMZ about Trump’s remarks, Newman asked, “What is a Black job? I don’t know where he got that from unless he’s taking it all the way back to slavery because you know the only 100% Black job in this country was back during slavery time.”
She went on to call his statements “so insane” and added that “the Black and Hispanic community are not monolithic.” But Newman threw shade at the country’s 45th president over his handling of race.
“I think that people will come to terms with the fact that Trump may not be equipped to deal with the racial issues that are going on in the country,” she said. “In fact, he’s kind of fed into a lot of them.”
Newman first rose to fame as a cast member on “The Apprentice” and is the former NBC reality competition’s most famous alum. After that, she starred on the Hollywood-tinged version, “Celebrity Apprentice,” as a fiery competitor. Then, Newman became one of the most prominent Black members in Trump’s White House, as she worked on outreach to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and racial disparities in the military justice system.
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While Trump tweeted well wishes during Newman’s December 2017 departure, their relationship later soured — and Newman’s comments aren’t the first time she’s compared the former president’s actions to “slavery.”
In February 2018, when discussing “thinking of writing a tell-all sometime” about her tenure in the White House during her time on CBS’ “Celebrity Big Brother,” Newman compared serving at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to slavery.
“Ooh, freedom, I’ve been emancipated. I feel like I just got freed off of a plantation,” Omarosa Manigault Newman said of her exit from the White House, according to The Wrap and People magazine.
Later that year, she released the tell-all book, “Unhinged,” which included critiques of Trump’s mental state and portrayed the former president as racist. She also claims to have secretly recorded conversations with Trump and then-Chief of Staff John Kelly, among others.
However, her “racist” comments about Trump opposed earlier remarks she made immediately after leaving the White House in December 2017, when she told ABC News that “he is not a racist.”
“It has been very, very challenging being the only African-American woman in the senior staff,” she told ABC News’ “Nightline” during a day-long media tour on television after leaving the Trump White House. She said most of Trump’s other senior advisers “had never worked with minorities” and “didn’t know how to interact with them.”
“Yes, I will acknowledge many of the exchanges, particularly in the last six months, have been racially charged,” she said. “Do we then just stop and label him as a racist? No.”’
Contributing: Gregory Korte, Lindsay Schnell
