With Omarosa Manigault Newman in the “Big Brother: Celebrity Edition” house, it obviously wasn’t going to take long for conversations to move away from the politics of the game to the politics of the real world. And with Keshia Knight Pulliam willing to talk about the hate that Donald Trump’s campaign incited, it didn’t take long for Omarosa to bring up Bill Cosby.
“You stood strong by somebody who you have known and have been loyal to and who [has] supported you, and people judged you for that. But only know the inner workings of your relationship with Mr. Cosby,” Omarosa said. “That’s the same thing with me and Mr. Trump.”
The moment came in the Feb. 8 episode, which was only the second of the 13 episode run. Omarosa was telling fellow houseguest Shannon Elizabeth that it had been “incredibly hard” to shoulder what she had for the last two years.
“I was so loyal to a person, and I didn’t realize that by being loyal to him was going to make me lose about 100 other friends,” Omarosa said.
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Pulliam entered the room, and Omarosa continued, “So I’m there fighting, fighting, fighting — getting my head bashed in — and nobody coming out to say, ‘We support her.'”
Pulliam, who noted that she and Omarosa, couldn’t be “further than polar opposites in terms of our political views, pointed out that by supporting Trump, it seemed like Omarosa was supporting the hate that was incited by his campaign — to which Omarosa responded, “When you’re in the middle of the hurricane, it’s hard to see the destruction of the outer bands.”
Pulliam said comparing the two relationships were like “apples and oranges.”
“It’s a different relationship because this man is running our country and being the voice of a whole country of people,” she said.
But Omarosadid not back down, pointing out that the African-American community looked up to the Cosbys, creating a big impact. “That’s the same thing,” she said.
Later in the episode, houseguest Ross Mathews asked Omarosa if the White House was what she thought it would be, which gave her an opportunity to reflect on the conversation she previously had with Pulliam.
“I see the pain when people speak to me about it — about how afraid they are,” she said, tearing up. “She thought I was apart of that [and] that’s not something I feel good about because that’s not something I was trying to do. That wasn’t me.”
Mathews told her he never “got” why she went to the White House with Trump, to which Omarosa tried to justify it as a “call to duty” to serve her country, not a particular president. She said she was haunted by his tweets and concerned every single day about what he would put on social media next. She also claimed she tried to be the person who would say to him, “What are you doing?” but that all of the people around him attacked her and cut off her access for doing that.
Omarosa did admit she “made choices” and had to live with them, though she said she would not vote for him again.
“I’m not there. It’s not my circus, not my monkeys. I’d like to say it’s not my problem, but I can’t say that because it’s bad,” she said. “It’s not going to be OK. It’s not.”
