Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman has recently claimed that President Trump’s team kept a list of a “crazy” ideas and “shocking proposals” used to distract the media when necessary.
In a Thursday interview with Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe , Manigault-Newman addressed Trump’s reaction to subpoenas from the House of Representatives, calling it “classic Trump.” She claimed that Trump would create “chaos” around the issue because he has something to hide, The Washington Examiner reported.
When pressed for clarification, the former White house aide explained that Trump’s team have a list of “very shocking proposals” that they would come up with whenever they felt like they needed to create a diversion. She said that the usage of these lists goes back to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and claimed that he and senior policy adviser Steve Miller would keep the ideas ready for “whenever they needed to throw a hand grenade to just blow up the press or take over the front covers of the newspaper.”
Manigault-Newman said that the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy — one that opened up the controversy surrounding migrant children being separated from their parents at the border — was also on the list.
“They talked about all of these different things. In fact, early on in the administration whey talked about child separations. We never imagined they would do them but that was one of the shocking proposals that was on this crazy list,” she said.
Former White House aide @OMAROSA Manigault Newman said President @realDonaldTrump team has a “crazy list” of “shocking proposals” to distract the media from other stories. https://t.co/wlp1iLqN1x
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 25, 2019
Manigault-Newman did not confirm whether or not she had the list.
The former aide to the president has made several claims about Trump since leaving the White House in 2017. Last year, she told NBC that she had personally heard a tape of the president using the N-word while he was filming the reality show The Apprentice . She said that hearing the tape confirmed that Trump was “a con and has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities.”
Trump said in a tweet that the creator of The Apprentice — Mark Burnett — assured him that no such tapes exist. Trump added that the word was not a part of his vocabulary.
In her book, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House , Manigault-Newman questioned the president’s mental and physical health. She reportedly claimed that Trump had an eighth or ninth grade reading level, adding that she had witnessed his mental acuity decline over the years. She also claimed that the president was obese, and that his unhealthy eating habits were catching up to him.
