NEW YORK — Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman responded to a question Tuesday night on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” about the fate of the country under President Trump by saying, “we’ll have to wait and see.”
Colbert asked Manigault-Newman about a comment she made while she was a contestant on “Celebrity Big Brother,” in which she said, in reference to the potential consequences of the Trump presidency, “No, it’s not going to be okay, it’s not.” She also said she was “haunted by tweets every single day.”
Manigault-Newman clarified her comments on “The Late Show” by saying she was talking specifically about the immigration debate with fellow “Celebrity Big Brother” contestant Ross Mathews.
“We were talking about a family of a man who had been in the country for 30 years and had been sent back, and Ross was expressing his concern about what was happening with immigration,” Manigault-Newman said. “I believe that the immigration debate will continue, and it’s a very difficult and complicated subject, and I don’t believe that it can be resolved so simply, and that was part of the discussion, and that’s why I was a bit emotional.”
Colbert also asked Manigault-Newman what specifically haunted her about the President’s tweets. She replied, “that’s not a place you want to find out at 5:00 in the morning about something.
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“You know, he announced major policy issues on Twitter, the transgender ban, for instance, was announced on Twitter,” Manigault-Newman said. “You want to find out in a policy briefing from the director of domestic policy about those issues and the subsequent follow-up for it, not on Twitter.”
Manigault-Newman joined the cast of “Celebrity Big Brother” shortly after she left the White House and made regular headlines by openly talking about her time at the White House while living in the “Big Brother” house, which is monitored by cameras 24 hours a day.
‘I feel like I just got freed …’
In her “The Late Show” appearance, she also addressed another noteworthy comment she made on “Celebrity Big Brother.” In describing her feelings about leaving a White House in which she was one of the only African-American senior White House staff members, she said “I feel like I just got freed off the plantation.”
“That has certainly a disturbing resonance for me, and I’m not an African-American,” Colbert said.
“The White House that I worked in, the Trump Administration, was troubling, and it was very difficult,” Manigault-Newman responded. “And my analogy of it being a plantation, being an ecosystem where people feel oppressed is pretty clear when you aren’t allowed to do the job that you were brought to do, to help be a change agent, to help be the liaison for communities that needed that assistance, that’s where that oppression comes from.”
She was a surrogate for the Trump campaign and worked for the Trump administration as the top communications official in the White House Office of Public Liaison before her resignation was announced in December. Her departure was mired in scandal after it was reported that she had a dramatic confrontation with White House chief of staff John Kelly and had to be physically taken off the White House grounds.
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