How reality TV shaped Omarosa's headline-grabbing press tour

Slate

"The former Apprentice contestant comes across as a younger, more vital, and more developed reality star than her former boss," says Lili Loofbourow of Omarosa's headline-generating media tour promoting her White House tell-all Unhinged. "She does not apologize. She acts in her own self-interest. And she is quite comfortable playing the villain if she needs to. At this juncture, she’s opted to play turncoat to Trump’s circle. It’s a storyline that requires her to perform a kind of prodigal daughter script to the rest of the world, an awakening to her past mistakes. She’s done this with typical skill over the past week as she’s promoted her book. Her strategy is not to present as an innocent." Loofbourow adds that Omarosa intended her story to be a "redemption narrative. It has to be. Reality-TV folks don’t build their brands on respectability—their freedom from conventional constraints like being predictable and well-liked is their power—but they can pull off One Big Pivot in their careers. Usually, it’s where they claim that, yes, they were part of the circus, but things have finally gone too far and gotten so bad that even they must shine a light on it! Only those who’ve been in the muck know what to fix."

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