Former Trump administration aide Omarosa Manigault Newman believes Sen. Kamala Harris is running an “important” and “historic” presidential campaign and added that if the Democratic Party nominates a black presidential candidate, Donald Trump would run a reelection campaign with racist undertones.
“In the spirit of Shirley Chisholm, I think it's important that we look at the only African American woman that's in the race and how important black women are, to how important they were to the last election and how important they will be to this election,” Manigault Newman said on BuzzFeed News’ Profile, noting that her praise for Harris didn’t necessarily mean she’d be voting for her.
Manigault Newman said that if Trump were to run against a black candidate in the general election, people only need to look to how he campaigned against HUD Secretary Ben Carson during the 2016 primary to see how he’d treat a black Democratic nominee.
“When Ben Carson was leading in the polls over Donald Trump, his first attack was that was Ben Carson was crazy, and started to attack him mentally, and then he started to assail his character,” Manigault Newman said. “I think that you'll see much of the same from Donald Trump that he will start to attack things that generally aren't political.”
“[The attacks] will be very, very personal and will have an undertone of the -isms, whether it's sexism, or racism, or misogyny,” she added. “You'll see a lot of those same kind of themes in Donald Trump's race if he goes head-to-head against an African American candidate.”
Manigault Newman also said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential obstruction of justice from the White House has “six or seven explicit examples of obstruction.” She added that she believes there are other examples that she thinks Congress will address to prove that the president was “intentionally obstructing justice,” pointing out that the Trump campaign immediately shut down staffers’ email addresses after the election.
“They said, ‘No, no. All of this we need to keep,’ and even to this day they say they don't know what happened to them,” Manigault Newman said, alleging that the campaign destroyed documents and deleted emails after the campaign. “So that's very clear.”
Manigault Newman did say the president had never explicitly directed her to lie while she was working for him.
“Let me tell you how it works, because he’s very clever. He tells the lie; he’s very sophisticated in his deceit,” Manigault Newman said, recalling her conversation with the president about firing former FBI director James Comey. “He phrases it in this question to engage you and he leads you on at the same time with that question.”
“He’s very clever at how he communicates his wishes to kind of keep his hands clean,” she said.
Watch the full interview with Manigault Newman on Profile on Facebook Watch.