Omarosa Manigault may have gotten off to a confident start on the latest edition of CBS’ Celebrity Big Brother. But on Thursday night’s episode, she breaks down.
In a new clip released ahead of the show’s second episode, the former Apprentice contestant and ousted White House staffer tearfully opens up to E! correspondent Ross Mathews about the state of the Trump administration, revealing a picture that sounds a lot like what Michael Wolff describes in Fire and Fury.
“I felt like it was a call to duty,” Manigault says, whispering for some reason despite the plethora of microphones and cameras. “I felt like I was serving my country, not serving him.”
“Like, I was haunted by tweets every single day,” she adds, dramatically. “Like, what is going to tweet next?” Positioning herself as a defender of decency, Manigault says she tried to be the person who would question the president, but everyone around him started “attacking” her instead. She seems to express a degree of jealousy that Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner were able to get closer to the president than she was.
Last fall, The Daily Beast reported that Manigault was “patient zero” in Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attempts to limit unfettered access to Trump. One White House official said Kelly was “thrilled that he has been able to stop staffers including Omarosa from bolting into the Oval Office and triggering the president with White House [palace] intrigue stories.”
“It’s not my circus, not my monkeys,” Manigault says. “I’d like to say not my problem, but I can’t say that because, it’s bad.”
When Mathews asks, “Should we be worried?” Manigault nods emphatically. When he says he wants her to tell him it’s going to be OK, she says, “No, it’s going to not be OK. It’s not.” She looks down as she adds, “It’s so bad.”