‘They’ve all failed’: Conway rips husband’s anti-Trump super PAC
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Thursday fiercely criticized the handful of conservative political strategists affiliated with the anti-Trump super PAC co-founded by her husband, contending they had all failed where only she succeeded — in electing a president.
“They’ve all failed. They never succeeded the way I did as campaign manager, and they never got their candidate where my candidate got,” Conway said. “He’s president of the United States — mostly because of what he did, and the vice president. They were our two greatest assets. But let’s be honest here.”
The remarks from Conway, who was named Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 and successfully steered his presidential bid through a tumultuous general election, came in an at-times combative interview with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner.
The cable network anchor asked Conway about Trump’s feud earlier this week with the leaders of The Lincoln Project, which attorney George Conway, Kellyanne’s husband, launched last December along with other prominent, disaffected Republicans and former party members.
After the group released a minute-long advertisement Monday savaging the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, the president lashed out at its leaders in a series of tweets — targeting George Conway; John Weaver, who advised then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 White House bid; Rick Wilson, who advised 2016 independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin; Steve Schmidt and Reed Galen, who advised former Arizona Sen. John McCain; and former New Hampshire GOP Chair Jennifer Horn.
Kellyanne Conway was similarly pressed Thursday on an op-ed authored by her husband and published Wednesday by The Washington Post, which charged that Trump’s behavior is dictated by his narcissism and that he “reacts with such rage” because he “fears being revealed for what he truly is.”
Although Faulkner prefaced her line of questioning by telling Conway that “this is not about your husband, this is not about your marriage,” the president’s aide nevertheless bristled. “It certainly is about my husband, or you would’ve quoted other people in the group — particularly, all the other ones who are political consultants and never achieved what I achieved, which is success as a presidential campaign manager,” she said.
Conway went on to insist the president “mostly” ignores his detractors within The Lincoln Project, and claimed Trump “wanted to expose, I think, a number of the people in that group who act like they’re so dignified and holier-than-thou than everyone.”
Conway also reprimanded Faulkner for devoting coverage to the controversy, telling the host she will “never get the time back that you’re spending reading these columns” and pushing back against “anybody elevating people’s opinions or projections or wishful thinking about somebody that they don’t know or that they hardly know.”
“Just because people have a Twitter feed and the president has a Twitter feed doesn’t make them the president. We have one at a time,” she said. “And he happens to be President Donald J. Trump.”