The Apprentice: Why Omarosa Lost

It’s finally time – Omarosa has left the building, later than many viewers and her fellow contestants wanted, but still gone. So now we get to take the long-awaited look at why Omarosa lost.

As the game of The Apprentice goes on, we are finally seeing that decisions are not based solely on what happened in the most recent challenge – both from the standpoint of the project managers and Donald Trump. In Episode 9, Kwame chose to bring Omarosa into the boardroom not because she had performed particularly poorly in the art challenge, but because of her overall performance compared to the others on their team, such as “all-star” Troy. Similarly, Trump didn’t fire her because of her performance in the art challenge, but because… well, if I tell you that now, it would make the rest of the article rather pointless. But the main issue is that, as Katrina indicated at the beginning of the episode, Omarosa really should have been gone sooner, but got lucky several times.

Let’s look at some of those times she lucked out. One time was when she was project manager for the charity auction challenge. She screwed up several things (including the pronunciation of Mizrahi’s name) and acted like a complete bitch. But she was lucky, because there was one thing Trump disliked even more than that – a person without a backbone who would let a complete bitch walk all over her. So Jessie got the boot.

Then there were a couple of challenges when her team won despite her best efforts to make them lose. In the apartment redecoration and renting challenge, Omarosa had to rest because of the Deadly Plaster Injury. She rested by playing basketball with some kids on the street. She was double-lucky there as apparently her teammates didn’t see it and they won anyway.

Then in the Trump Ice water challenge, she repeatedly acted in ways I can only describe as idiotic. Talking about the water and how she was a water connoisseur was just pretentious and silly. Then, she and Amy agreed that Amy would talk numbers and yet Omarosa kept interrupting her sales pitch to lowball the buyers. Several times over, Amy reminded Omarosa not to do that and Omarosa agreed – only to do it once again. Perhaps the worst thing was that after it was over, she said that Amy kept kicking her under the table because that was a signal they’d worked out, and Omarosa said Amy was lucky she didn’t kick her back! Talk about clueless!

Oh, but Omarosa was all excited when she sold two cases. Woohoo!

Give me a break.

In any event, the point is that if Troy hadn’t brought them to success with the distributors and his re-order idea, it is very likely that Omarosa would have gone that week.

But instead she held on to bitch and moan another day. Which brings us to the present.

I have to give credit where credit is due. Omarosa was indeed the only one who had the right idea when it came to picking the artist this time – though she did not fight for it nearly as hard as she wanted Trump to believe. Also, the problem is that she had created such a horrible image with the others that they were not going to listen to her. I mean, she called herself a water connoisseur, fercryingoutloud! Who would believe her when it came to art and talking about looking at something from the artist’s perspective? I wouldn’t have. The woman is constantly putting on airs and acting superior – as if she knows everything about everything. After people get to know you, they realize that you’re full of crap and don’t listen even when you might occasionally make a good point. As the saying goes, even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn. Then again, it’s more likely that the blind squirrel will become highway roadkill, which is what ended up happening to Omarosa.

But getting back to giving her the little bit of credit she deserves, Omarosa did manage to sell a small picture of a cat for over $800. I still don’t know how she did that – I mean, it was a cat. Or maybe it was the acorn for the blind squirrel. In any case, I don’t think it was Omarosa’s great sales techniques that sold the picture. This person obviously came in with money to burn (a good assumption, I think, for anybody who would buy a picture of a cat for over $800!) and was just looking for something. Whoever had happened to hook up with her would have likely closed the sale.

So, as we see, even giving her the credit she deserves for this challenge leaves her with a huge debit in her overall account.

Besides everything else we’ve already discussed, Omarosa got a reputation for making excuses and trying to avoid work. As several of her teammates said, her head always hurt at very convenient times. Even the whole lunchtime fight with Heidi stemmed from her complaint that her head hurt so she needed to eat. Excuse me, but bullsh*t. (Yeah, I know, Omarosa will get upset at me for my potty mouth and dropping a BS-bomb.) I’m sorry, but you can’t use your head hurting as an excuse for everything whenever it’s convenient. Frankly, I still don’t see the connection between a headache and wanting to eat. Why is that? Because I doubt there is any connection. She wanted to sit down and eat, so she used the Deadly Plaster Injury as an excuse. Everybody on her team knew it – as we saw when Troy and Kwame made fun of her melodramatics on the other end of the phone.

I find it particularly ironic that Omarosa was the one who took Tammy aside in the very first episode to tell her why going to lunch in the middle of a challenge wasn’t a good idea. Yet here we had Omarosa doing pretty much the same thing.

In addition to her reputation for excuses, she also became quickly known as patronizing, condescending, inflexible, and unwilling to listen to anybody else’s thoughts. If the idea wasn’t hers, it was worthless. One early example was the way she reacted when her team didn’t like her idea of picking a name randomly for the second project manager, before they had even found out what the challenge might be. Then there was her hanging up on her teammates when she didn’t feel the need to explain herself to them. I could go on and on (and on and on) but we lived through it once already, so why punish ourselves?

One other issue that needs to be discussed is her accusation that Ereka was racist because she used the term, “pot calling the kettle black.” As recapper Betsy Wasser noted at the time, I did some quick investigation and found that the term does not have any racial connotations whatsoever, despite the way it might sound to the uninformed. So Omarosa claiming it was a racist statement is akin to the official a few years back who thought the word “niggardly” was racist – both of them were clueless yet acted like they knew what they were talking about. In fact, between this and some other comments she made – such as her statement that the other women were intimidated by strong African-American women – it seemed to me a bit like Omarosa was looking for racist attitudes where none existed. We certainly never saw anything that indicated anything resembling racism from her teammates – in fact, the only person who ever brought it up was Omarosa herself. And considering that Kwame was the one who selected her to go into the boardroom and reacted to her attitude and excuses like everybody else, it’s clear that we can safely say her race had nothing to do with anything.

But getting back to the point at hand, when it was time for her team to go into the boardroom because of their horrible loss, Omarosa felt safe despite everything we’ve already discussed. She didn’t think Kwame would bring her in because of the work she’d done in this particular challenge. But even though she thought Kwame was on her side, he knew what she was just as much as the others did.

And even if he didn’t initially think he was going to take her in, the way she acted in the boardroom and the way Trump reacted to her could easily have shown Kwame that it would be a good idea to take her in – it was pretty obvious that Trump wanted her gone. Either way, Kwame was smart to take her in. He simply had to declare that they took a risk and it didn’t work. No excuses. Then he could just sit back and let the women fight it out.

And they did.

Trump wasn’t terribly happy with Heidi, but Omarosa was the one who thought she was better than everybody, made excuses for everything, and had a huge chip on her shoulder. It certainly didn’t help that she burst back into the boardroom without being called while Trump and the others were still deliberating.

She said she stepped up and worked hard. Hmmm, that must have been between games of basketball with the kids in front of the apartment. Or maybe it was on those occasions when her head wasn’t hurting – wait, no, those times only came during off hours. Maybe then it was when she wasn’t making excuses or acting like she was better than everybody else around her – wait again, I can’t think of many times like that.

Trump had fired a warning shot across Omarosa’s bow during his firing of Jessie. He made it clear that her attitude sucked and she needed to correct it. She didn’t – she ignored him just the way she ignored her other teammates many times over.

She did not show leadership, but caused internal fighting. She made excuse after excuse to try to explain away her often bizarre behavior. There was no way Trump could see Omarosa working for him in any sort of fashion, let alone as a top executive. Omarosa had more chances than she deserved, and she blew every one of them. That is why Omarosa lost.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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