Having been fired before and knowing what that feeling is like, I hated to see Omarosa Manigault Newman get the axe (or did she!?!) from the Trump White House earlier this week. I felt it less so out of empathy for the jobless than for the sheer comedic presence she displayed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. the last 11 months.

Worse still was ABC-TV’s Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts “dissing” her following the coup the network pulled off of getting Omarosa for an interview. Roberts did it with a simple, terse two-word sayonara:

Bye, Felicia.

For those of you who never saw the comedy movie, ‘Friday’, where I first heard that term: rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube said it was “the phrase to get anybody out of your face that’s saying something stupid.”

So, “Bye, Felicia” has now morphed to when someone considered irrelevant is no longer welcomed on the premises, and can be dismissed (exit, please) with very little fanfare.

Initially, there are two stories on Omarosa’s demise from the President’s inner circle:

Once a star on President Trump’s former NBC show The Apprentice, Omarosa went on to be one of the first persons to gain a top-flight administration job soon after Trump’s inauguration: she became his Director of Communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Though the White House announced Wednesday that Manigault Newman had resigned from that position, it was later reported that she had been fired, according to insiders. She’s said to have been literally thrown out of the White House by Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly and Secret Service agents after challenging her dismissal and then later attempting to see Trump personally upstairs at his White House residence.

The thing I haven’t figured out through all this is what the heck is Director of Communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison? Talk about wasting our tax money!

Having worked with press people for over half my life, plenty of my media colleagues said that title was a head-scratcher for them too. I do know that it was said to have been a job paying close to $180,000 a year, and based on the number of times since Jan. 20 she’s been visible for White House photo-ops that rounds out to around $15,000 a month, or about $500 a day!

Omarosa made a controversial name for herself in the political world even before she entered Trump’s White House, and not just on television. Though she’s claimed to have served as a top official in the Clinton White House for then-Vice President Al Gore, and spoke glowingly to anybody who would listen about her time there, a PEOPLE Magazine investigation later revealed that she had inflated her title and success as a political appointee.

In fact, before she became the villain on The Apprentice, she also made quite a few enemies at the White House in 2000, where she was banished from four jobs in two years with the Clinton administration. At her last one, she was asked to leave as quickly as possible, because for several weeks in 2000 she was “so disruptive, one woman wanted to slug her,” one source said.

“Her exact title was scheduling correspondent,” another former staffer said. “Her job was to respond to invitations. Not only that but, she didn’t do her job, and it got everybody else in trouble.”

You could cite her wedding photo-shoot on the White House lawn before her nuptials at DC’s Trump Hotel, inviting Congressional Black Caucus members to a meeting with the President and signing her name, ‘the Honorable Omarosa Manigault”. And my personal favorite: saying that every Trump critic and detractor will one day have to “bow down to President Trump”.

On GMA Thursday Omarosa denied being fired and announced plans to one day “tell her story”. I just wonder if after all this hubris, there’s going to be anyone around who’ll want to listen to it.

 

Gene Motley is a Staff Writer at Roanoke-Chowan Publications. Contact him at gene.motley@r-cnews.com or 252-332-7211.