There were many points at which Kellyanne Conway could have forcefully rejected her boss Donald Trump’s claims that an election was tainted by fraud. There was the 2016 election, of course, after which Trump tried to sidestep his popular-vote loss by insisting that millions of people had voted illegally somehow. Conway, then at the White House, does not appear to have offered any objection.
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Then there was the little-remembered election in Florida in 2018. Gov. Rick Scott (R), seeking election to the Senate, was (like Rep. Ron DeSantis, who sought his job) clinging to a very thin lead over his opponent. So Scott very loudly claimed that ballots being counted in populous Democratic counties were an effort to steal the election for his opponent — with the goal of having that vote-counting stopped or simply to elevate skepticism about the results. Trump eagerly agreed.
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” Trump tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Very familiar rhetoric from Trump now, but this was not a standard part of his patter at the time. So interviewers pressed people such as Conway on it. ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, for example, asked her at the time whether Trump had evidence for his assertions.
“The evidence is that Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have won,” Conway answered. She then raised questions about the supervisor of elections in Broward County, where vote-counting was underway — carefully elevating Trump’s rhetorical point while not specifically signing on to the conspiracy theories.
In her new book “Here’s the Deal,” Conway does something similar for the 2020 election: admitting that Trump’s defeat was not demonstrably a function of rampant illegal voting but, at the same time, reiterating all of the-election-was-sketchy-anyway claims that Republicans have been deploying since late 2020 to find some stable ground between Trump’s base and reality.
But doesn’t Conway deserve some credit for at least admitting Trump didn’t win? Perhaps, except that the reason for doing so is as transparent as her unwillingness to undercut Trump in 2018. Conway’s central point is that 2020 was winnable by Trump — if he had had a better campaign manager, like the one who won his 2016 race. Which is to say: Kellyanne Conway.
The passage from Conway’s book that has garnered attention for its deviation from Trump’s line is this one:
This is the hustle in the consulting world, of course. There’s always a reason that a loss wasn’t your fault or a win was, and it’s always the case that the thing for which you weren’t hired would have gone better if you had been. Conway knows this, of course, and even deploys it without irony against Trump’s campaign team.
“Admitting defeat would have required these advisors to forgo future paydays,” she writes. “The Trump campaign raised $200 million after November 3 to prove the election had been stolen. A smooth transition and a focus on the president’s legacy would have served him and the country better.”
If those advisers said they lost a winnable race, who’s going to hire them? If they say that they lost because of a scary boogeyman named Fraud, though? Different situation.
Notice, too, how Conway asserts that it’s some vague entity called “the Trump campaign” that was holding the post-election vacuum over supporters’ wallets. A smooth transition would have served Trump’s legacy better, yes, but it isn’t just the consultants who benefit from that massive post-election haul. So does Trump. The former president wanted to keep the payday going, too. He still does.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
Then there was the little-remembered election in Florida in 2018. Gov. Rick Scott (R), seeking election to the Senate, was (like Rep. Ron DeSantis, who sought his job) clinging to a very thin lead over his opponent. So Scott very loudly claimed that ballots being counted in populous Democratic counties were an effort to steal the election for his opponent — with the goal of having that vote-counting stopped or simply to elevate skepticism about the results. Trump eagerly agreed.
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” Trump tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Very familiar rhetoric from Trump now, but this was not a standard part of his patter at the time. So interviewers pressed people such as Conway on it. ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, for example, asked her at the time whether Trump had evidence for his assertions.
“The evidence is that Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have won,” Conway answered. She then raised questions about the supervisor of elections in Broward County, where vote-counting was underway — carefully elevating Trump’s rhetorical point while not specifically signing on to the conspiracy theories.
In her new book “Here’s the Deal,” Conway does something similar for the 2020 election: admitting that Trump’s defeat was not demonstrably a function of rampant illegal voting but, at the same time, reiterating all of the-election-was-sketchy-anyway claims that Republicans have been deploying since late 2020 to find some stable ground between Trump’s base and reality.
But doesn’t Conway deserve some credit for at least admitting Trump didn’t win? Perhaps, except that the reason for doing so is as transparent as her unwillingness to undercut Trump in 2018. Conway’s central point is that 2020 was winnable by Trump — if he had had a better campaign manager, like the one who won his 2016 race. Which is to say: Kellyanne Conway.
The passage from Conway’s book that has garnered attention for its deviation from Trump’s line is this one:
But that’s immediately followed by this:“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time. It wasn’t the result I wanted. It wasn’t the result some 74 million Americans — by far the largest number of people ever to vote for an incumbent president — wanted.”
Pretty nifty, no? The car salesman telling you that you wouldn’t have had that problem with your tires if you had simply bought a Ford in the first place.“Equally sad and troubling was the missed opportunity he may have had to win a second term outright and, overwhelmingly, to avoid lawsuits, recounts, audits, legal challenges, assorted machinations over a stretch of months, and January 6, and to spend the enormous campaign fund’s $1.4 billion more wisely, including on a postelection legal strategy and team worthy of an incumbent president facing enormous resistance and once-in-a-century, global-pandemic-compelled changes to who can vote, how, and for how long.”
This is the hustle in the consulting world, of course. There’s always a reason that a loss wasn’t your fault or a win was, and it’s always the case that the thing for which you weren’t hired would have gone better if you had been. Conway knows this, of course, and even deploys it without irony against Trump’s campaign team.
“Admitting defeat would have required these advisors to forgo future paydays,” she writes. “The Trump campaign raised $200 million after November 3 to prove the election had been stolen. A smooth transition and a focus on the president’s legacy would have served him and the country better.”
If those advisers said they lost a winnable race, who’s going to hire them? If they say that they lost because of a scary boogeyman named Fraud, though? Different situation.
Notice, too, how Conway asserts that it’s some vague entity called “the Trump campaign” that was holding the post-election vacuum over supporters’ wallets. A smooth transition would have served Trump’s legacy better, yes, but it isn’t just the consultants who benefit from that massive post-election haul. So does Trump. The former president wanted to keep the payday going, too. He still does.