The real reason why Donald Trump hired The Apprentice alum Omarosa Manigault Newman to work as a White House aide has been unveiled in an upcoming book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass.
"I saw her very little in the White House. The White House is a very big place! It's buildings, actually. But the people hated her in Washington," the ex-president, 78, who spoke to Variety's Co-Editor-in-Chief Ramin Setoodeh, said. "Her personality — she was late all the time. She wouldn't show up. Look, I tried to rehabilitate her reputation as an experiment."
"And when I did, I said, 'This probably won't work out but let's see what happens,'" Trump added. "And I also said, 'When she gets fired, you always have to pay a price.' It's too bad. In the White House, she didn't cut the mustard. Omarosa was a major hit in her first year. Her anger, her craziness, it just worked so incredibly well."
The reality star appeared on The Apprentice multiple times before Trump announced he was hiring her weeks before he was sworn into office in 2017. She only lasted until December of that same year.
When Newman, who was first hired under the Clinton administration, got the boot, she told NBC's Chris Matthews she was suffering from a concussion, leading her to not do her job well.
"Listen, Omarosa played the villain," Eric Trump told the book author about her time on TV. "We as a company know plaster extremely well. We're builders. A little drop of plaster landed on her shoulder, and she's walking around with ice packs, as if a high beam had dropped off the top of a building and hit her. Do I think she was hurt? No. But that was great entertainment."
Donald brought back Omarosa toThe Apprentice in later seasons. "She was a great television personality the first time. And then I put her on a second time, and she bombed," Donald said. "The first time she was evil. The second time, she tried to be evil. And the third time, she tried even harder. And when you try, it doesn't work. Does that make sense?"
Though her stint was short-lived, Donald gave her another chance, becoming his campaign's director of African American outreach. "And then I helped her get a job at the White House because she was begging me to help restore her. So I figured, why not? I put her in," he recalled. "I told people when we hired her, I said, "When we fire her, we'll have nothing but trouble. But that's OK. That's the way life goes."
He added: "A lot of things I do in life, I do as an experiment. I mean, I do it out of human interest — just to see who's loyal, who's not loyal. She was actually really great to me, until she left."
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As OK! previously reported, Omarosa, 50, admitted she should never have worked with Trump.
"For me, I just can’t believe I fell for a con man, a con man who turned out to be the biggest fraud. I mean, literally found by the courts to be a big fraud, so a lot of the backdrop of our show, a lot of The Apprentice that we thought was real was fabricated, and it was just a house of cards. So, I mean, we were duped, and we were young entrepreneurs thinking that we were really gonna learn something from this brilliant businessman. All we learned was not the art of the deal but the art of the con," she told Entertainment Tonight.