14 August 2018

Reality Bites

Donald Trump has a long history of bad hiring decisions and a loyalty to incompetent hire who remain fiercely loyal to him. When he hired Omarose Manigault-Newman as a senior White House official with a posh West Wing office only a few steps away from Trump's, based on the simple fact that she was a loyal contestant on his reality television program, he once again demonstrated his cluelessness in judging people.

Not surprisingly, Manigault-Newman turned out to be a disaster at her job. Notwithstanding she was still loyal to Trump at the time and he to her, she was fired from the White House early this year.

In true Manigault-Newman form, after she was fired, rather than get angry, she got even. She landed a deal to write a tell-all book, which was recently published to very mixed reviews, in part because the book contradicts itself a number of times.

Her lack of other talents aside, Manigault-Newman is an expert at self-promotion. Perhaps predicting she'd be fired, as she had been in a number of previous jobs, she made secret tapes while at the White House and after she was terminated.

As part of her promotion for her book, she has been releasing those tapes during media appearances promoting her book. The first release was an audio recording made during her actual termination by the White House Chief of Staff.

While that incident had no particularly newsworthiness other than as gossip, how the recording came into being is very newsworthy and shows, once again, how the Trump White House is recklessly insecure.

The secretly taped conversation was made in the White House Situation Room, one of the most security facilities in the world. This event is now being called one of the worst security breaches in presidential history (details here).

Yesterday, another secret tape was released -- this one of a telephone call made between Trump himself and Manigault-Newman the day after she was fired and removed from the White House (details and recording here).

This tape reveals a clueless President who's apparently been doing a lot of television viewing. Trump opened with saying "Omarosa? Omarosa what’s going on? I just saw on the news that you’re thinking about leaving? What happened?"

His White House hasn't told him one of his own senior staffer was hired and he's learning that instead from TV. She said to him at this point "General Kelly came to me and said that you guys wanted me to leave."

Trump replied: "No-- I, I, Nobody even told me about it.... I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that. Goddamn it. I don’t love you leaving at all."

This begs the question of who's really in charge, because Trump makes it sound like he isn't -- he's just some figurehead parked in the Oval Office in front of a TV.

The last famously disconnected President was Ronald Reagan, late in his second term when adcancing senility of kept him isolated and confused. That was when a major scandal, Iran-Contra, went down without Reagan knowing, an illegal action that ended with certain key White House official facing criminal prosecution.

With these tape revelations on Trump, one can only imagine what's going on right now under Trump's nose in the West Wing. It doesn't sound like knows much of what's going on at all. That's a very dangerous situation for America, one that adversaries like Vladimir Putin will certainly try to exploit.

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