What Is It That Omarosa Does at the White House, Anyway?
Omarosa Manigault has been a fixture in the Trump White House almost since he was sworn into office, but no one is clear exactly what is is she does—including her.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Elaina Plott asked the communications director for the Office of Public Liaison what matters she was handling for President Donald Trump. Her reply was simple: “Everything.” Perhaps that explains her annual salary $179,700, the highest figure allowed for a White House staffer.
What little is known is that the former winner of “The Apprentice” used her time to plan her wedding and hold a special luncheon for her wedding party at the White House.
“Her days are numbered, but Trump is trying to give her time to resign,” a source told the Daily News over a month ago. In recent week, she’s become an emblem of the chaos that has engulfed the west wing.
Plott sat down with Manigault in the Roosevelt Room moments before Steve Bannon was scheduled to convene with a delegation from Egypt. “We’ll just be a few minutes,” plopping down on a sofa with a reporter for the first of what was supposed to be a two-part interview. She explained to Plott that it was “a very, very busy day," so the reporter ended up “shadowing” the former reality TV star. “You can see me in action,” she told him at the time.
“At some point we are looking for a certain Josh, though we don’t ever locate him,” Plott says of following Omarosa around the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The reporter revealed she never found out why this “Josh” was needed. “As we knock on the door to one office, she finally muffles an answer as to what we’re doing: ‘…the faith communities, does anyone need to be blessed…'”
Answers begin and end with similar sentence fragments. When a colleague asks if she’s planning on doing “Dancing with the Stars,” she confesses she can’t due to a foot injury she endured jumping into a motorcade in January.
The second half of the interview never took place. Instead, Plott asked Republicans what their impressions were of the reality star’s whirlwind morning.
“Wait, Hope [Hicks] let you follow [Omarosa] around?” one source asked Plott. Hicks wasn’t chairing the communications office at the time. “So Sean [Spicer] let you?” Spicer wasn’t leading the department then either. “Christ,” the source replied. “No one in the comms department knew a random reporter was walking around the West Wing. This is why people think we’re a sh*t show.”
Since Gen. John Kelly took over as Chief of Staff, rumors of Manigault's impending departure have picked up.
“Before Kelly, any right-wing extremist could barrel into the Oval Office and slap their personal manifesto on the boss’ desk to putrefy into government policy,” comedian Samantha Bee said during a September episode. “But no more—the V.I.P. room is now off limits.”
Plott revealed that she “learned little more than the fact that she was getting married,” when searching for what exactly Manigault did all day. When asked if the White House funded the bridal luncheon, not even the White House spokesman could offer a coherent answer.
“I have no idea… I will try to track her down,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded when asked. Friday a senior White House official replied that the lunch never took place, but Manigault "did invite her bridesmaids to have lunch with her in the navy mess which all commissioned officers are allowed to do.”
In her book, The Bitch Switch, Omarosa argues that a woman in control—of her life, of her relationships, of her career— “determines her own rules of engagement for every situation.”
Still, it’s unclear if the White House staffers have been able to locate her missing shoes.
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