Former President Donald Trump’s top aide Omarosa Manigault Newman exposed lies her ex-boss made about his ancestry amid false claims of Vice President Kamala Harris not being Black, The New Republic reports.
Manigault Newman sat in on a panel during CNN’s Laura Coates Live on July 31 and made the bombshell accusation about the former president identifying as Swedish “because he didn’t want to acknowledge that his father was German and his mother was Irish, and he thought that that would play better to those who were patronizing his businesses.”
“So can we call the question his past of self-identifying as first Swedish, then German, and then Irish whenever it’s convenient?” the former reality star asked.
“Donald doesn’t know the difference between ancestry and race. He doesn’t want to know the differences or understand the nuances of how people self-identify. And so, I believe that that’s disqualifying for him.”
Omarosa continued to pinpoint the reasoning behind him blatantly mispronouncing Harris’ first name after fellow panelist Bruce LeVell, the former executive director of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, was asked by Coates about Trump questioning Harris’ ethnicity, according to Yahoo News.
Manigault Newman feels it’s a harmful tactic used “to make people see the otherness of Kamala Harris.”
“And when he mispronounces her name, Laura, he does it as a slur. He does it intentionally to harm her,” she said. “And so I pose a question to Bruce when he says, ‘Oh, at some point she identified as this, and at some point, she identified as this,’ are you going to hold Donald Trump to the fire for identifying himself as Swedish, even though he has no Swedish roots, in his bestselling book, The Art of the Deal?”The lie came from the 1987 published book where the GOP presidential candidate highlighted his ancestry, penning that his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.”
After a Swedish organization asked the Trump family to put up an exhibit about the family in a museum, he clarified what he meant 13 years later in another book, claiming his grandfather had come from Germany.
Omarosa’s remarks come just days after the four-time indicted businessman engaged in a tense panel discussion at the National Association of Black Journalists’s (NABJ) annual conference. ABC News’ Rachel Scott asked whether he believed Harris was only at the top of the Democratic ticket because she is a Black woman. He responded by saying he had recently found out that Harris was Black.
“I didn’t know she was Black until several years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” he said.
Harris, born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, went to Howard University, a historically Black college and university, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the first Black female Greek-lettered organization established in the U.S.