OPINION:
Omarosa Manigault Newman, the black woman and former reality television star who served as the White House director of communications for the Office of the Public Liaison, has just resigned, reportedly under pressure.
And now the media have twisted the story to say that President Donald Trump’s administration is just too white.
Look at this headline, from The Washington Post: “Omarosa Maniguault’s departure highlights lack of diversity in Trump White House.”
The story goes on to say that Trump better get with the diversity program — or else face a fate similar to Roy Moore in his Senate face-off against Doug Jones.
“[Manigualt Newman’s] rivals cast the move as an overdue housecleaning,” The Washington Post reported, “but her departure, on the day that black voters helped catapult Democrat Doug Jones to an upset victory in the Senate race in Alabama, highlighted perhaps a more worrisome issue for the White House and the Republican Party heading into a midterm election year — the stark lack of diversity in Trump’s administration and the GOP’s diminishing appeal to minority communities.”
While it’s true black voters, who made up 29 percent of the electorate in Alabama’s special election for Jeff Sessions’ seat, voted for Jones with a resounding 96 percent vote — 98 percent of whom were black women — it’s also true that blacks typically vote Democrat anyway.
Then there’s this, from The Atlantic: Alabama “had the fifth-highest black turnout of any state in the 2014 midterm elections,” and “the Obama years saw strong returns of black turnout — and thus black electoral power — in the 2016 election.”
In other words, black voter turnout has been pretty high in Alabama in the past, even during midterm elections.
So trying to make the case that black voter turnout in Alabama, combined with the black Manigualt Newman’s departure from the White House should serve as some sort of warning to Trump about his too-white administration seems pretty thin.
It seems a thinly veiled attack, as a matter of fact.
Moreover, as The Washington Post itself reports, deep into the story, Manigault Newman previously supported Hillary Clinton for president and once served as a low-level aide for Bill Clinton’s White House.
That job didn’t work out for her, either.
“She was asked to leave that job, a former official said, because she was ’so disruptive,’ ” the newspaper wrote.
That’s funny — that’s reportedly sort of why she was pressured into leaving her White House position this time around.
There was a time when Barack Obama was heavily criticized in the press for his own lack of White House diversity — his own failures to bring in women into his inner-circle. The media have been trying to toss the diversity card against Trump for a long time.
“A Plea For Diversity in the White House,” read one WBUR headline in January.
And this, from the Huffington Post, in July: “Yet Again, The White House Interns Are Overwhelmingly White.”
But looking into Manigault Newman’s reportedly long-overdue departure for deeper connection to and commentary on the Alabama race — one that paints Trump in a negative light, of course — just seems over-the-top. Perhaps her departure is just that — a departure. Not everything that happens in this White House has to show a darker side of Trump.
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