Jimmy Kimmel has been thinking about the time Omarosa Manigault stood him up on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2004 “a lot lately.” Because her reason for bolting from the late-night show’s set seemed to involve a lie detector test — and possibly “plenty that she was trying to hide” about Donald Trump, Kimmel told the Daily Beast in an interview published Wednesday.
“What happened was, my Uncle Frank lied about something. And I thought it would be funny to give him a fake lie detector test on the air, something that he thought was real,” Kimmel recalled.
The late-night host said the “Apprentice” alum saw the test set up and “decided that we were going to spring it on her.” Kimmel added, “If you know anything about taking a polygraph test, that’s not how it works. It takes a long time. There’s no ding and no buzz. It’s a chart that they analyze afterwards. So that was preposterous just to start with.”
“But she stormed out of there and the show was live, so we had no guest,” Kimmel said. “She was very angry.”
“I’m sure there was plenty that she was trying to hide,” he added, of what Omarosa could have been trying to conceal about her early days with Trump.
Omarosa just released her tell-all book, “Unhinged,” this week, after saying a tape exists on which Trump can be heard using the “N-word” on the set of “The Apprentice.” Kimmel said that if that’s true, this revelation might actually be a threat to the president.
“If there’s a tape of the president using the ‘N-word,’ I think that’s a line in the sand–and maybe I’m wrong, I’m always wrong, so I’m going in with that caveat–but I think that’s a line in the sand that his fellow Republicans will not cross,” Kimmel told the Daily Beast. “And I do not see them throwing the full force of their support behind the president if something like that is revealed. I really don’t. But I could be wrong.”