Omarosa, Recording

Omarosa Manigault at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photograph by Gage Skidmore

From The New Yorker:

No one is buying that the hardened reality-show player could not see what was tweeting in front of her. So what is Omarosa really selling? Her product is not simply the alleged tapes but the idea that she may have outmaneuvered Trump. I’ve written before about Manigault’s scrounging embrace of black exceptionalism. Opportunism has never morally burdened her, which makes her self-interest seem both egregious and banal. She has clung to her infamy, in part, by perverting the black worker’s experience of racism. She has always exploited the vantage of the pariah, but has more frequently tried to frame herself as a victim. Even during her post-White House stint on “Celebrity Big Brother,” which she describes in the book as a needed respite, she thought herself persecuted by her housemates, who relentlessly questioned her Trump loyalties. Our infantilization of women in power has, at times, elicited empathy for figures such as Hope Hicks, Melania Trump, and Ivanka Trump. This seems to be what Omarosa seeks.

“Omarosa, the Tragic Narrator of Our Times”, Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker