Responding to news that Omarosa Manigault Newman--the former White House staffer that Donald Trump hired --intended to blow the whistle on the goings-on at the White House in her new book, Trump, in a dog whistle to misogynists and racists, called her a "lowlife" and a "dog."
Manigault Newman, who rose to fame as a contestant on Trump's reality series The Apprentice, has been vocal about her former boss and his administration in the lead-up to the release of her book, Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House. She also revealed recently that she recorded the lengthy private session last September during which Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, fired her.
It's not unusual for Trump to lash out at anyone who threatens to expose him. It's even less unusual for him to hurl insults at a woman and a person of color in language traditionally used to stereotype marginalized people. His repertoire of racist or misogynistic insults includes repeatedly referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas, implying that Megyn Kelly was having her period when she dared press him during a debate in the 2016 primaries, and accusing Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski of "bleeding from the face" due to cosmetic surgery.
Trump's defense of white nationalists following last year's deadly Unite the Right rally coupled with referring to Colin Kaepernick, an NFL player who took the knee during the National Anthem (to protest police violence against people of color), as a "son of a bitch" is telling.
Just last week, Trump insulted two men of color in a single tweet when he called CNN's Don Lemon and NBA star LeBron James -- who'd just created a school for at-risk youth in Ohio -- "dumb."
But Trump's tweet about Manigault Newman is a new low -- calling a woman a "dog" is a way to demean a woman's appearance, as well as call her a bitch.
The level to which the man in the White House has stooped to insult those he perceives to have wronged him appears to have no bottom. And the outrage on Twitter was fast and furious. Here's how Trump's tweet was received by some: