No faking it: a good news day for Donald Trump

The sacking of an FBI agent and the implosion of a critic gave Donald Trump something to tweet about on his return from holiday.

Omarosa Manigault Newman and Donald Trump last Halloween. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s first day back from his summer holiday was a very good one for the President.

First he received the news that the FBI had sacked — rather than merely disciplined — veteran FBI agent Peter Strzok for his anti-Trump text messages to his then lover Lisa Page.

Second, he watched as former White House aide-turned tell-all author Omarosa Manigault Newman further undermined her flagging credibility by admitting she had secretly taped a conversation with the President. This came after she released a tape of chief of staff John Kelly sacking her, an act that was at best unethical and at worst illegal.

Trump crowed about both Strzok and Newman on Twitter because this pugnacious President loves nothing more than a win.

First to the case of Strzok.

He believes he has been hard done by for getting sacked for sending anti-Trump tweets to Page. The veteran FBI agent ­argued that his personal views — which he is allowed to have — did not interfere with his job as an FBI investigator. An inspector-general’s report backed this up, saying it could find no evidence that his political opinions infected his professional work for the FBI.

In the end, the anti-Trump texts were spectacularly unprofessional behaviour for an experienced FBI agent who was in a senior role in both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe.

Strzok knew about the political sensitivity of both of those probes and he was risking their credibility by sending those texts even if he thought they would remain private. The fact that he did so to a work lover during an extramarital affair did not help his cause.

The decision by the FBI to sack him will fuel Trump’s campaign to discredit the broader Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The fact there is no proof that Strzok distorted any investigation against Trump will be largely lost in translation.

His removal will strengthen the President’s hand in making his ­argument to his voting base that whatever findings Mueller makes, they are tainted by political antagonism towards him within the FBI.

The case of Manigault Newman is more bizarre. The once-loyal aide to the President, who was on The Apprentice with him and who has now written a tell-all memoir about her time in the White House, has fumbled her story already.

Her book, Unhinged, is released in the US today but her admissions that she secretly recorded phone conversations with the President, with Kelly and reportedly with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and others have greatly undermined her credibility.

The White House has a point when they argue that it us Manigault Newman who suffers from integrity problems.

So far, the recordings she has released reveal nothing shocking or even particularly newsworthy.

She uses her book to make serious but unsubstantiated alle­gations. For example, she alleges the President used the word nigger repeatedly on an audio while he was host of The Apprentice but says she has no evidence to prove it. Manigault Newman’s book is the first by a White House aide to take aim at Trump.

In interviews this week, she has shown such naked bias against the President and his team that what she says about the White House will inevitably be treated with scepticism.

All up, it was a good day for the President to return from his 10-day vacation at his New Jersey golf resort. With the mid-term elections less that three months away, Trump will now enter campaign mode as he seeks to protect the ­Republican majority in congress and set himself up for the second half of his first term.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia