Omarosa Manigault-Newman is not doing any of this because she wants to do the right thing. She is a cheerful opportunist who maintained a close relationship with a reality TV host on whose show she appeared 14 years ago, and who parlayed that peculiar bit of fame into a West Wing job after he became president. (This is almost certainly not the reward she expected, but sometimes, shrewd investments pay off more handsomely than one imagined.) She defended him to everyone until the moment she determined that remaining loyal was no longer her most profitable course of action, at which point she promised to sell explosive evidence of his bigotry—not that anyone would be surprised to hear him use a racial slur, given how flippantly we assume he uses it in private, but still—to the highest bidder.

This, however, is more than Sean Spicer or Reince Priebus or Rex Tillerson or Gary Cohn or Dina Powell or any of the other Trump officials who have been escorted from the White House over the past two years can claim. Each one of these people had the opportunity to do what Omarosa is doing now. Instead, the more courageous ones mumbled something about being grateful for the opportunity to serve their country and then disappeared; the more craven ones yuk it up on late-night television and hope you'll find their lies as hilarious as they do in retrospect. Impure though her motives may be, Omarasa is actually doing the shit, and this terrifies him.

There are two things that make Donald Trump very angry: disloyalty, and women. Both of these pet peeves stem from the same egotistical impulse, which is that power and respect are things he distributes magnanimously to smaller people who, on their own, would not otherwise deserve it. When he believes longtime errand boy Michael Cohen will betray him to avoid legal trouble, it is an outrage. When he sees Steve Bannon suddenly giving unflattering interviews about the goings-on in the Oval Office, it is evidence that his trusted senior policy advisor is (and always was) a conniving ingrate. The way Trump perceives loyalty is a tricky thing, because every breach just serves to reinforce the framework in which he is the benevolent, generous benefactor who keeps acting against his better judgment, and who never should have given traitors a chance in the first place.

Watch:

The Roots of Trump’s Prejudice