First it was Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, who now intends to run for president, now it’s Omarosa.
In its desperation to dig up or invent Trump scandals, the media has opened the doors to erratic fringe characters. And when it takes them seriously, it destroys its own credibility.
“Hearing it changed everything for me,” former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman told NPR on Friday.
Manigault Newman was referring to what she calls the “N-word tape” — a long-rumored but never surfaced tape of Donald Trump on the set of The Apprentice allegedly using the racial slur. In her interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin, Manigault Newman claims to have heard the tape and heard Trump using that slur on the tape.
But that’s not what it says in her tell-all book, Unhinged, due out on Tuesday.
When asked by Martin about the discrepancy during the interview, Manigault Newman insisted Martin must not have read the book (she had) and pointed to a section at the very end of it.
But in that section, Manigault Newman doesn’t actually describe hearing the tape. She writes of calling one of her “sources” who had a lead on the “N-word tape.”
Good on NPR for asking such a basic question. And it’s already obvious that media outlets which take her seriously will get burned. But why was someone with so little credibility even promoted by the media? Her book does everything but repeat the Gorilla Channel story.
Among other things, the book also claims Trump wanted to take the oath of office on a copy of The Art Of the Deal rather than the Bible and that she saw him swallow a piece of paper after an Oval Office meeting with his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
Yes, it does seem very plausible that Trump wanted to take his oath of office on The Art of the Deal while watching the Gorilla Channel. This is the sort of thing a ghostwriter channeling Andy Borowitz would come up with.
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