Omarosa‘s new book, Unhinged, is filled with stories that reinforce some of America’s worst concerns about President Donald Trump and people in his administration – like Betsy DeVos.
According to Fast Company, Omarosa writes in her new book that the Education Secretary was one of her biggest rivals, particularly because of how DeVos views Black, poor, and minority students.
In early 2017 DeVos had said that students who attended the first Historically Black Colleges and Universities were the “real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” school choice – aka, public school funds being poured into private, religious schools via vouchers – being DeVos’ raison d’être.
“No, Secretary DeVos, it was not always a choice to go to black colleges,” Manigault Newman says she told DeVos. “Black students had to attend black colleges because most PWI [predominantly white institutions] did not accept black students as recently as the 1960s.”
In May of last year DeVos gave the commencement address at Bethune–Cookman (photo), a historically-Black university. Students protested her and her racist remarks that co-opted the entire history of HBCUs by turning their backs. It was so bad that the school’s president threatened to hold back diplomas if the protests did not stop.
DeVos, it turns out, never got the message.
“It was an embarrassing moment for the administration and the video went viral, but DeVos told Manigault-Newman, ‘I did great!’ and tried to explain the students’ negative reaction by disparaging their intellect, according to the book,” Fast Company reports.
“They don’t get it. They don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish,” DeVos told Omarosa.
In other words, she mocked their intellect, FC reports. DeVos thinks they aren’t smart enough or mature enough “to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.”
“Manigault-Newman fired back: ‘They get it, and they aren’t happy about you or your goals.'”
Omarosa gets the last word: “DeVos is ‘woefully inadequate’ and ‘as horrible as you suspect she is,'” she says in Unhinged.