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Pollster: Omarosa Says I'm Source of Trump N-Word Story, But I've Never Heard It

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The Trump White House has certainly had its share of drama since the 45th president took office, and the past week was no exception.

An African-American former aide to President Donald Trump who spent years defending him has pivoted 180-degrees and is now accusing him of being a horrible racist … but the examples she is using don’t seem to hold much water.

Omarosa Manigault-Newman first received attention as a contestant on “The Apprentice,” which, of course, featured then-businessman Donald Trump as its star.

After impressing Trump, Manigault-Newman — who often goes by just her first name — joined the billionaire’s campaign staff and was a strong defender of him during the presidential election.

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“I’m black, female and Donald Trump is my friend,” she wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in 2016.

“In my experiences with him, he has only been professional. I am aware of the perceptions. But he is open-minded: He does not judge people on their gender or race. He judges them on their ability to do the job,” she continued at the time, according to Fox News.

Suddenly, the same woman is now accusing Trump of racism. Not long ago, she was let go from her White House staff position by Chief of Staff John Kelly after allegedly misusing government vehicles and other ethics violations.

Kelly, by even Manigault-Newman’s account, tried to let her go on good terms as a “friendly departure.” In what appears to be a good-will gesture, Trump’s team offered her an ongoing consulting position but made it clear that she would no longer be working in the White House.

Do you believe Omarosa Manigault-Newman's story about Trump racism?

But it appears there were other plans in the works for the former “Apprentice” star. (A 2017 profile in Politico described her TV career like this: “She became a walking one-name synonym for office backstabbing, dubbed one of the nastiest TV villains of all time by TV Guide.”)

Manigault-Newman announced she was writing a controversial book claiming to be a tell-all account of Trump’s presidency. At the same time, Manigault-Newman began accusing the president of racism, completely contradicting her earlier words.

It’s that explosive book that now has people scratching their heads.

The White House has pushed back against Manigault-Newman’s claims, and a respected political expert who appears in the book is also calling the fired employee out for playing fast and loose with the truth.

“I’m in @Omarosa’s book on page 149,” tweeted Frank Luntz, a well-known pollster and political analyst who has previously been critical of Trump.

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“She claims to have heard from someone who heard from me that I heard Trump use the N-word,” Luntz wrote. “Not only is this flat-out false (I’ve never heard such a thing), but Omarosa didn’t even make an effort to call or email me to verify.

“Very shoddy work.”

In a separate tweet, Luntz criticized the publication of the book overall. “It seems like certain book publishers these days care more about getting a release out than getting the facts down,” he wrote, perhaps thinking of the anti-Trump screed “Fire and Fury.”

“This is why people don’t trust these ‘exposés,’ which is especially bad for authors who actually are good and reliable,” Luntz wrote.

It seems very likely that Manigault-Newman invented rumors against Trump in order to save face and sell books after being fired. That’s certainly the view of White House insiders.

“It’s sad that a disgruntled former White House employee is trying to profit off these false attacks, and even worse that the media would now give her a platform, after not taking her seriously when she had only positive things to say about the president during her time in the administration,”  White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, according to Business Insider.

“Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations.”

While trying to salvage her reputation, Manigault-Newman may have sabotaged any credibility she had left — and the anti-Trump media was all too willing to play along.

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Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico.




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