Election 2020

Kellyanne Conway Says ‘Trump Lost’ and His Fans are ‘Stuck in Parallel Universe’ for Not Accepting His Defeat

Kellyanne Conway has always been one of Donald Trump’s staunchest aides but in a new book she readily admits that Trump lost the 2020 election and singles out his campaign staff and the election-deniers in his camp for giving him bad advice, Politico reports.

“Despite the mountains of money Trump had raised, his team simply failed to failed to get the job done. A job that was doable and had a clear path, if followed,” Conway writes in her memoir, Here’s the Deal. “Rather than accepting responsibility for the loss, they played along and lent full-throated encouragement (privately, not on TV) when Trump kept insisting he won.”

By not being truthful, Trump’s team let him down, Conway notes.

“The team had failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied the evidence he sought and the respect he was due. Instead supplicant after sycophant after showman genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver.”

Kellyanne Conway dancing with Trump at his inauguration, which she claims she could’ve stopped when Trump said he wanted to drop out of the race following the Access Hollywood scandal.

Conway soon became a Trump loyalist when she began presiding over his 2016 presidential election and served as his counselor in the White House. But Politico notes that her admission of her former boss’s electoral defeat is quite notable, “even if it amounts to stating out loud a well-established fact.”

There has been a slew of other books from other Trump aides, including former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper but all of these books have a disaffected air about them and warn of the dangers of allowing Trump to run again for office. Conway, on the other hand, is still in Trump’s world and stands a good chance of being selected to run his presidential campaign if he does decide to run. She also visits him regularly at Mar-a-Lago and talks to him all the time.

Politico notes this recent acknowledgment that Trump lost the election is perhaps one of the most upfront admissions Conway has made in public about the 2020 election. During an interview with The 19th in December 2020, Conway said that while the Trump campaign had the right to explore other legal avenues to challenge the results, the Electoral College vote tally meant it was likely Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would win.

Just a reminder of the time Kellyanne Conway kneeled on the sofa in the Oval Office as is she was in her own home. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

And in her book, she tells us this is exactly what she told Trump.

“Stuck in a parallel universe, many Trump supporters deluded themselves into thinking that somehow the president would somehow remain in office or be reinstated once gone. Trump was more shocked to lose in 2020, I think than he was to win in 2016,” she writes, adding however that questioning the results or “partisan activists” doesn’t make you the “QAnon Shaman.”

“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,” Conway notes.

And of course, if there’s one thing we learned, it’s that Kellyanne’s husband George Conway didn’t particularly like Trump and made no bones about it. Axios reports she’d question him about it and she apparently found his answer unnerving.

“‘What are you doing, George?’ I asked him plainly and calmly. I got the same answer every time … ‘You work for a madman,’ George would say in a loud, sinister voice.”

Donald Trump and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway greet supporters during his election night rally in Manhattan in 2016. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Frankly, George was not wrong but must have been a very chaotic time for the couple. I’m sure it wasn’t fun for either of them.

“Like everything George did during this time, I found out about it after it happened or as it was happening,” Conway writes. “It was sneaky, almost sinister. Why not own it, share it, sneer in my face with a copy of tomorrow’s Washington Post op-ed or next week’s Lincoln Project ad?”

Conway turns on the melodrama a little bit:

“Night after night, I would come home after a busy night at work … While I was minding dishes, dogs. laundry, managing adolescent dramas and traumas (her daughter, Claudia), George would be just steps away from me, tucked away in his home office, plotting against my boss and me.”

I’m sure that wasn’t a fun time, but those Lincoln Project ads were almost certainly effective in ensuring Trump’s loss, so I say kudos to George for that.

meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

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