How much would it have cost Team Trump to buy her silence by giving her a sinecure on the campaign? $250,000? $300,000?

Instead Lara Trump wanted to bring her on for the same salary she was getting in the White House, seemingly knowing that Omarosa had things in her “back pocket” that might end up being used against Trump. She could either cash in with a book deal and a media tour, monetizing all the crap she’d recorded during her months in the West Wing, or she could … go work for the same money in a far less glamorous job.

“Cheap out on de facto extortionists” isn’t part of the art of the deal. And so we’re about to embark on a Very Special Episode of “The Apprentice: White House.” Via The Hill:

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman said Monday she will speak out against President Trump for the duration of the midterm cycle, painting herself to The Wall Street Journal as a member of the “resistance.”

“I’m going to continue to blow the whistle about the things I saw,” Manigault Newman said in an interview with the Journal amid the ongoing publicity tour for her new tell-all book.

“Hopefully we can save the essence of the presidency without the president doing way too much damage to it,” she added…

“I’m going to go toe-to-toe because I stand on the truth and I stand on what’s right,” she said.

Can you be part of the hashtag-Resistance if you spent your entire adult life until five minutes ago working for the guy whom you’re supposed to be resisting, praising him in the creepiest, most North Korean ways? When everyone knows that you’d be working for him to this day if his chief of staff hadn’t come to dislike you?

You probably can, actually. They’re not picky. The guy who sunk Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances is part of The Resistance now, for fark’s sake. There has to be room for a random TrumpWorld grifter willing to say anything to create bad press for him among a very, very, very receptive media:

Using the media monitoring site TVEyes.com’s publicity value per 30 seconds of screen time, the Free Beacon determined her seven interviews on NBC and left-leaning cable network MSNBC were worth $27,870,325.19. Her on-air time totaled 92 minutes, 6 seconds…

Manigault Newman also did separate interviews with MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and co-hosts Stephanie Ruhle and Ali Velshi on Aug. 13, Katy Tur on Aug. 14, Craig Melvin on Aug. 16, and Al Sharpton on Aug. 19. In that latter interview, she said Trump wanted to start a “race war” in the country.

The values for each respective appearance are included below in a list of all seven interviews.

It’s egregiously unfair of the press to give one person an advantage in a narrative battle with others by providing him or her with loads of free coverage, don’t you agree?

I think Trump and his team were right not to offer her mega-bucks to silence her. She’s a reality-show clown whom no one on either side trusts. How much damage can she really do? Oh, that reminds me: Here she is telling Al Sharpton that she thinks Trump wants a, errrrrr, race war.