President Donald Trump was mocked by one of his favorite TV shows Wednesday morning when the hosts of Fox & Friends criticized him for his foolish handling of the Omarosa Manigault-Newman book launch.
Trump is known to be an avid viewer of the show but it’s not yet clear if he began his Wednesday morning being chided to his face.
Commenting on the public showdown between the president and his former White House adviser, host Brian Kilmeade said it was obvious who was getting the upper hand.
“In order to sell a book, [Omarosa has] come out with a series of tapes and in many ways seems to have outsmarted the president who has taken the bait and gone out and tweeted directly at her,” Kilmeade said.
The host’s choice of words is likely to have gone down particularly badly with the president, since he is often keen to boast about his own intelligence and suggest he is capable of easily outsmarting his rivals.
Kilmeade went on to suggest that Trump was not even smart enough to have learned from his past mistakes.
“After the president came out and gave Michael Wolff millions of dollars by going after his book he seems to be doing the same thing with Omarosa’s book,” he said.
Wolff publicly thanked Trump for making his book, Fire and Fury, a worldwide bestseller. The book claimed that Trump was mentally “incapable of functioning in his job.”
Kilmeade has become the most rebellious of the Fox & Friends hosts, hitting the president for one of his “ridiculous” Russia tweets and criticizing his handling of the NFL protests.
This time, fellow host Ainsley Earhardt backed him up with evidence that Trump’s savage tweets about his longtime Apprentice and White House colleague Omarosa had dominated the news agenda Tuesday.
She did partially excuse the president by blaming the media.
“Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to answer questions about this,” Earhardt said. “A few questions about Afghanistan, China, South America, ISIS, Muller, and Turkey but the majority, like four times the amount of questions were about Omarosa. The media is obsessed with it.”
The explosion in interest from the media was not prompted by the book’s Tuesday launch day but by Trump’s attack on his former charge as a “crazed” “lowlife” “dog.”
Sanders insisted that labeling Manigault-Newman a dog was “nothing to do with race,” but she said she was unable “to guarantee” that a tape showing Trump using the n-word would not one day emerge.
The book, Unhinged, describes Trump as a racist and a bigot.