The White House is going to have a whole lot more trouble pushing back on Omarosa Manigault Newman’s accounts of her time in the Trump administration now that she’s unveiled tape of chief of staff John Kelly firing her in the Situation Room and, a day later, Donald Trump saying he didn’t know she’d been fired. There can be no doubt that Newman has proof to back up a lot of what she says in her new book—even if she had to behave in wildly unethical ways to get that proof.
“Omarosa? Omarosa what’s going on? I just saw on the news that you’re thinking about leaving? What happened?” Trump asks on a recording apparently made the day after Newman was fired. When she replies that Kelly “came to me and said that you guys wanted me to leave,” Trump says “You know they run a big operation, but I didn’t know it” and “I don’t love you leaving at all.” (Since this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, he may well have been lying and have personally ordered her firing.)
The recording of Kelly firing her in the Situation Room simultaneously shows, again, that Newman can back up what she says, and just how unhinged she herself is, having recorded in an area where staff aren’t supposed to bring personal cell phones at all. But while that fact gives the White House a chance to call out her integrity and judgment and potentially take steps against her, the recording serves as a reminder to Newman’s former coworkers that she might have recordings of them, too:
"People now understand that she has a lot," a former White House official said. "It's stopping people from punching back." [...]
"If you pissed off Omarosa, buckle up -- it's going to be a tough couple of weeks," said one former official.
Unlike all those easy smooth weeks in the Trump administration. And the thing is, while Omarosa is a terrible, unethical, untrustworthy person … Donald Trump made her. He made her famous, and more than a decade later he brought her into the White House knowing just who she was. So nobody can really act surprised she’d do any of this, or see Trump as her innocent victim.