No one could ever figure out what Omarosa Manigault Newman’s job was as an aide to Donald trump. The only thing we heard about was that she spent a lot of time planning an elaborate wedding for herself using the White House as a background. But now it is becoming clear that she spent a lot of time talking to people and, according to her, secretly recording the conversations.

Or did she? Who the hell knows? She is a notorious fabulist and self-promoter and thus an ideal person to serve in the Trump administration. She has played recordings of her being fired by Trump chief of Staff John Kelly and later Trump telling her that he was not aware of it, which is hard to believe. Trump, for all his big talk, seems to be afraid of actually telling people to their faces that they are fired and always has surrogates do it. Now Trump has raised the stakes, going from calling her ‘wacky’ to a ‘dog’.

Stephen Colbert has a good roundup of the Trump-Omarosa spat.

What has grabbed the most attention is her claim that tapes exist of Trump using the n-word. Is anyone really surprised that Trump would use such language? He has said that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary and never have. She made it up”, which is hard to believe. Even if such a tape were released that directly contradicted that statement, Trump could appease his supporters by saying that it was just easily forgettable ‘locker room talk’. After all, they bought it in the case of his earlier comments about grabbing women by their genitals.

What is clear that while Omarosa may have no useful skills, she does have the ability to grab attention and by steadily dribbling out bits of salacious information, she has managed to get Trump’s goat and lure him into a public war of words that serves her purpose of being constantly in the media. Trump today calling her a ‘dog’, disgusting though it is is, plays into her hands. If Trump were deliberately trying to give her greater visibility and promote sales of her book, he could not a better job. She has taken control of the narrative. She has clearly used her time as Trump’s apprentice on his reality show to learn to use media to her advantage.

Live by reality TV, die by reality TV.