Omarosa Manigault-Newman continues to make headlines this week with a new book, recordings from her time at the White House and a fiery beef she is having with President Donald Trump.But even amid the whirlwind press tour, the former White House aide has admitted that she fell short of the mark when it came to advocating for the Black community during her time as the Trump campaign’s director of African-American outreach and later as the administration’s director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison. “In some ways, I came up short,” she told the Grio when asked if she had accomplished her goals for the Black community.“A lot of that was [because of] the animosity toward Donald Trump. People just generally were devastated that this racist was going to run our country,” she added. “So, no matter what efforts I put out, people didn’t want to see that type of residual outreach.”She also said she understood why people reacted so violently toward her whenever she tried to do actual outreach: “I would get frustrated because I would show up and people would boo and hiss and protest and downright just completely push back against my efforts…. I could certainly see why people didn’t want me there. But, nonetheless, I thought it was important for me to reach out.”Manigault-Newman is currently in a feud with her former employer over her new book, Unhinged, which was released on Tuesday. In it, she alleges that Trump is in mental decline and that he’s a racist. She has also given numerous interviews in which she’s leaked audio excerpts of Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her from the Trump administration in December as well as a private phone call she had with the President after her termination. And while she once vouched for Trump’s commitment to the Black community, she now claims he’s used the N-word. Indeed, the former Apprentice star says her support for Trump was a “blind spot” that she is now correcting.“I was too close to him to really see what he was doing, and in a lot of ways I missed the mark in terms of having an opportunity to impact him a little more,” she told the Root. “[People] thought that I was complicit with every single decision that he made, and that wasn’t always the case…. To [sit] at the table [with mostly] White men and then to walk out and try to go to my community [and] get the pushback that I got. I didn’t realize it until after I left the White House, just how heavy of a burden that was.”She may have lightened her burdens with the new book, but Omarosa still has a firestorm ahead of her. The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit against her this week, even hiring the lawyer that represented wrestler Hulk Hogan in his sex tape lawsuit against the now-defunct gossip site Gawker.“Well, I have to be very careful because, as of today, Donald Trump has decided to sue me, or bring litigation against me, to silence me and to not allow me to tell my story,” she told Trevor Noah on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. She says she has a host of lawyers advising her not to give Trump any ammunition.
