The Only Trump Critic the MSM Won’t Touch

Someone help me understand why Donald Trump hired Omarosa Manigault-Newman.

I keep turning it over in my head. He knew she was…eccentric. That’s a nice word. He had no reason to think she could accomplish anything. She had no skills. There was no evidence that she was bright.

The most likely reason he chose her was her viability as a diversity scarecrow. He could point to her, along with people like Katrina Pierson and Ben Carson, and he could say, “I gave black people important positions.” Omarosa was exceptional, however, because she wasn’t really able to do anything.

Dr. Carson is a celebrated surgeon who has separated Siamese twins; as far as we know, none of them have grown back together. Pierson had her issues during the campaign, and she screwed up, but she did her job, and she was considered sufficiently competent to be rehired.

Omarosa had no track record. She was not an achiever. She became the “director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison,” which is sort of a nothing position, and during her time there, people say nothing is what she got done.

I suspect that “director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison” is sort of like “executive producer.” In Hollywood, “executive producer” means “person someone important slept with” or “relative of someone important.” It’s a job moviemakers give to people who aren’t expected to do anything. The White House has a press secretary, and that person is the President’s face before the public, so one wonders whether Omarosa’s title meant anything at all.

Maybe Omarosa’s hiring was Trump tossing her an affirmative action bone. On the other hand, maybe he was keeping an enemy close. Maybe she knew things he didn’t want to see revealed, and he figured giving her a high-paying, do-nothing job would shut her up.

Maybe Trump really did use the dreaded N-word. Or maybe he simply said things that were, as Penn Jillette puts it, “racially insensitive.” Maybe Trump gave Omarosa a job because he couldn’t have her dumped in the Potomac.

I don’t think Trump used that word, unless he was doing something silly like quoting a rap song or jokingly calling someone “my nigga.” Trump is a loose cannon, but he’s not a moron. Also, he says someone from The Apprentice has backed him up, saying no recordings of the radioactive word exists.

I think he gave this woman a job because he felt like it. She was someone he knew, and he likes working with his contacts. It looked good, giving a black woman with no qualifications a big title. I don’t think there is anything more to it.

It was a mistake to hire her, obviously. If she didn’t have dirt on him before she was hired, she certainly has it now, even if it’s imaginary dirt. Because she worked for him for a good while, she can make nutty claims about him, and they can’t be dismissed instantly. They have to be researched and debunked, and even if they’re disproven, many people will choose to believe the worst. There are millions of people who think Bush II dynamited the levees in Louisiana. No lie is too stupid to take hold in the minds of certain people.

One of the problems with keeping a vindictive, dishonest person close is that you give that person new opportunities to gather ammunition, and when you finally fire that person, her poisonous merchandise may be worth a lot more than it was when you hired her. Trump bought Omarosa’s loyalty for $180,000 per year, but she surely got paid more than that to write…I mean “dictate”…her book. It is said that she was offered a new job when she was fired, but the pay wasn’t substantially higher than what she got at the White House, so it’s no wonder she went for a book deal instead.

I’m not too impressed with Penn Jillette. He says he, himself, may not be a reliable source. If I were to paraphrase his remarks, I would put it like this: “Trump either said the N-word or other things that were highly racist, and I heard him, but you can’t believe me because I might not tell the truth, so I won’t say exactly what he said. But I feel sufficiently confident in what I’m saying to issue this bizarre indictment of my own credibility.”

Does he have Alzheimer’s now?

If you’re not sure what Trump said, you keep your mouth shut, don’t you? Or you say, “I’m not sure what he said.” You don’t say, “I heard him say really bad things, but don’t trust me.” That’s ridiculous. Either you know or you don’t. If you don’t want us to rely on you, what is the purpose of opening your mouth?

What is “racially insensitive”? It’s nothing. It’s a weasel’s way of saying, “Anything ranging from, ‘All blacks should be executed’, to, ‘I think classical music is better than jazz.'” It means nothing at all.

Ross Perot caught hell for using the phrase “you people” to address blacks. Maybe Trump said, “you people.” Maybe he said, “I think forced busing was a bad idea.” What does “racially insensitive” mean, in the absence of the actual words? It means Penn Jillette wanted to say something bad about Trump, but he wasn’t willing to be specific or be pinned down so Trump could defend himself.”

These days, “insensitive” is a useless phrase. The threshold of sensitivity has been lowered to the point where nearly any remark can be construed as insensitive. Also, our self-anointed liberal bellwethers have decided that all insensitivity is bad. It’s always wrong, and it’s almost always a firing, career-ending offense. That’s crazy. Sometimes insensitivity is just what the doctor ordered. Jesus said a lot of insensitive things, deliberately.

Sometimes, when a person is offended, it means that person is a jerk. Your state of offense is just as likely to highlight your own failings as those of the person who offended you. Being offended doesn’t speak well of you. It says nothing, without context.

The worst people I know are offended all the time. They use offense to control other people. They get furious over things the rest of us would barely notice. They cry like babies with diaper rash until they get their way. More often than not, the people who offended them are in the right.

Wife-beaters and child abusers are people who are easily offended. Bullies of all types are easily offended. We ought to quit using offense as a measure of a person’s moral rectitude.

When Penn Jillette says Trump said “racially insensitive” things, it means absolutely nothing to me. What were the things he said? Who considered them insensitive? All we know is that Penn Jillette felt like commenting.

Whether intentionally or not, Jillette is teasing us. Do you have something? If so, you should spill it or shut up.

I wonder if Jillette has financial troubles. Nearly all of the people who appeared on Trump’s reality show had career problems. We never saw George Clooney or Mark Zuckerberg on the show. Jillette has made a ton of money in his life, but a lot of entertainers have made fortunes and died broke.

Maybe he made some dumb investments. Maybe he needs free PR now. He hasn’t had a lot of big-time projects in the last 10 years. He does a lot of reality TV. He’s a giant among magicians, but they don’t seem to do all that well compared to actors and musicians. They have to keep clawing for work and coming up with gimmicks in order to hold our attention.

There has to be some explanation for his appearance on the show and his weird remarks.

This thing will play out eventually. Either the N-word will be confirmed, or it won’t. The one thing I feel safe in predicting is that Omarosa will have a very hard time finding work from now on. She’s getting a dead-cat bounce from her firing and book, but she is clearly poison to employers and coworkers, and she has nothing to offer to counterbalance the potential for trouble. She’s so crazy and unreliable, even left-wing news outlets are refusing to back her up.

Maybe she can become Jillette’s assistant. I know Donald Trump would love to see someone saw her in half.