The Conways dated during the Clinton impeachment and married at the dawn of the George W. Bush presidency. Kellyanne made it her mission to get women some respect in the Republican Party. Her niche survey research firm, the Polling Company, made money advising corporations about how to market American Express cards and Vaseline to women; but her major project was on teaching boorish politicians like Pence and Newt Gingrich how to close the gender gap. Conway even co-wrote a book with Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live.
This could not be good for Donald Trump. Surely, Kellyanne Conway, who made her name railing against the diminishment of the presidency by Bill Clinton, and wrote bipartisan books about women and politics, was not going to try to defend his atrocious verbiage and behavior. When Trump’s campaign manager cancelled morning talk show appearances on the Sunday after the Access Hollywood tape was released, the rumor was that even Conway had a breaking point. And that it had been reached.
Or not.
That Sunday night, barely two days after the Access Hollywood fiasco began to unfold, Conway put an end to it.
Trump had turned in a typically convoluted, and just plain weird, appearance that evening during the second presidential debate in St. Louis. Afterward, Conway sat down with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to declare victory. Matthews asked about the tape. “I’m with the campaign until the bitter end, unless…” answered Conway. Sensing vulnerability, Matthews asked: “Unless what?”
Conway was wrestling with the question of whether another tape would surface, or that the next day’s news would feature another victim of Trump words and deeds that Nita Chaudhary, the co-founder of UltraViolet, characterizes as “the embodiment of a culture that normalizes sexual harassment and violence against women.” Conway was not embracing the National Organization for Women’s view that “Donald Trump Promotes Sexual Assault As a Rich Man’s Perk.” But she was clearly struggling with the prospect she might be signing on to a sinking campaign. Right there on national television. And then she remembered her higher calling: electing a Republican president who would serve the interests of her billionaire benefactors. “I’m sitting here as his campaign manager,” she declared. “I’m sitting here with you where he just performed beautifully.”
Suddenly, Conway was “on.” She was spinning on all cylinders with the robotic precision that led a Pulitzer Prize–winning author who appeared frequently with Conway on pundit panels in the 1990s and early 2000s to describe her as “an absolute automaton for her wing of the Republican Party.”
“I’ve made a commitment and I believe that he would be a much better president—first of all, he won the debate tonight, clearly,” chirped Conway. “And the reason you know he won the debate is (a) you watched it or (b) everyone is going to talk about that he was standing behind her and in her space. I am committed to not letting Hillary Clinton appoint the next three or four justices to the Supreme Court.”
From that moment forward, Conway was everywhere, as Trump Defender No. 1. Yes, of course, Conway argued, Trump’s words were “horrible and indefensible,” but she claimed, in a fact-free pivot, that some of the Republicans who were now trashing Trump had harassed her when she was “younger and prettier.” Within days, she was jettisoning expressions of concern and sympathy and simply dismissing new charges of groping and harassment—no matter how valid, no matter how detailed—with a casual announcement that “I believe—Donald Trump has told me and his family, and the rest of America now—that none of this is true. These are lies and fabrications. They’re all made up. And I think that it’s not for me to judge what those women believe. I’ve not talked to them, I’ve talked to him.”
That was all that was needed—not to sway backers of Hillary Clinton, or to attract moderate swing voters. It was what was needed to keep conservative women on board for Trump, and in so doing to keep Trump viable for the final month of a campaign that Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway had calculated could be won not with a majority of the vote, and perhaps not even with a plurality of the vote, but with a narrow Electoral College strategy that focused primarily on linking the conservative base with disaffected white working-class voters in a handful of battleground states.
“If Kellyanne had not been there when the firestorm hit, I don’t know if we would have made it. She literally became a cult figure during that time period, just because of her relentless advocacy for Trump on TV,” Bannon explained in an early 2017 conversation with the Atlantic, which reported that “Bannon says it was Conway’s calm presence that led both wavering women and conservative voters to think: If she can still support Trump, I can, too.”
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who has known Conway for decades, and who has engaged in his share of intense political fights in the United States, Israel and other countries, says Conway saved Trump from political oblivion. “He owes her for standing up for him. I could not have done what she did,” Luntz marveled. “I would not have survived it; I’m impressed that she did. In every possible sense, she won. I do not believe he would be president without her.”
What Conway won was an opportunity to keep defending Trump in a way that historians will come to understand as a new form of political mendaciousness: spin rooted in absolute loyalty not to a man or a party but to an insider agenda that most viewers, perhaps even most reporters, barely recognize.
Conway did not enter the 2016 election cycle as a Trump backer. At the behest of her political paymasters, billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah (“the First Lady of the alt-right”), Conway ran the Keep the Promise political action committee that championed the doomed candidacy of Texas senator Ted Cruz. Americans who were not familiar with Conway got to know her as the regular on CNN who ripped Trump as “fairly unpresidential” and who objected that the billionaire “built a lot of his business on the backs of the little guy.” She called Trump “vulgar” and criticized him for failing to be “transparent” with his tax returns. She even pointed out that he did not seem to understand the basic premises of the “pro-life movement,” which the once pro-choice Trump embraced with increasing passion as the 2016 race evolved.
After Trump burned through a pair of caricature campaign managers (the thuggish Corey Lewandowski and the oligarch-obsessed Paul Manafort), the candidate was left with the Republican nomination but no real campaign infrastructure. The Mercers, who had transformed Conway’s pro-Cruz Keep the Promise super PAC into a pro-Trump Make America Number One super PAC, began pulling strings for the woman who says: “Rebekah’s a very close friend of mine, personally.”
As the New Yorker explained: “In August, the Mercers recommended that Trump bring in Bannon to lead a reorganized effort. ‘I’ve never run a campaign,’ Bannon told Trump. ‘I’d only do this if Kellyanne came in as my partner.’ Conway said that Trump offered her the job of campaign manager on August 12th, in a private meeting in his office. ‘We’re losing,’ she told him. ‘No—look at the polls,’ Trump replied. ‘I looked at the polls. We’re losing,’ she said. ‘But we don’t have to lose. There’s still a pathway back.’”
It was a torturous pathway, to be sure. But the Mercers got the campaign manager they wanted, and the president they had not wanted but were more than willing to work with. And Conway, as the ill-defined but ubiquitous “counselor” to the new president, got to redefine spin in her own image.
She achieved the task fully just two days into Trump’s presidency, with an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press that literally rewrote the language, and obliterated the boundaries, of American politics. Moderator Chuck Todd was pressing Conway on a point of fact. White House press secretary Sean Spicer had claimed, in stark contrast with the physical and historical record, that Trump had attracted “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.”
After several attempts to get a clear explanation from Conway, a frustrated Todd said: “
You did not answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood. Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one.”
“No it doesn’t,” snapped Conway. “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood.” But it wasn’t, Conway asserted. “Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains—”
Todd had had enough.
“Wait a minute—alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered… were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”
Chuck Todd was absolutely right. Kellyanne Conway did not care.
When Todd made one last game attempt to get Conway to acknowledge reality, she threw a word salad at him: “Maybe this is me as a pollster, Chuck,” “You know data well,” “Prove those numbers,” “No way to really quantify crowds.”
Todd was dumbfounded and he smiled as the dumbfounded do.
“You can laugh at me all you want,” snapped Conway.
“I’m not laughing,” Todd said, “I’m just… befuddled.” So were the viewers. Conway smiled. Her work here was done.
— 4 —
HE WHO WILL NOT BE QUESTIONED
Stephen Miller
Senior Advisor to the President
The makers of films such as 1984 and V for Vendetta have given us some eerie embodiments of Big Brother. But they never created a Big Brother character as ominous as Stephen Miller, the squinting thirty-one-year-old Trump true believer who appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on the morning of February 12, 2017.
It was an important appearance. Top Trump communications aides Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway had fumbled badly in recent appearances. They were being mocked on comedy shows. Their names were becoming synonymous with “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Even conservative commentators were suggesting that “the communications team” was harming rather than helping the Trump agenda. After “a week of chaos and interruptions, none bigger than an appeals court decision upholding the block on the president’s travel ban,” host John Dickerson noted that an “undeterred… Mr. Trump promised to fight, but also maybe to start over.”
Perhaps a new face could begin the reset.
“We go now to the White House briefing room and President Trump’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller,” announced Dickerson. And there, glaring at the camera, was the man the Trump administration was counting on to reassure America.
It soon became clear that cold comfort was on the agenda. Asked about reports of North Korean weapons testing, Miller replied that Trump would supercharge Department of Defense spending so that “we will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.” For good measure, he added that Trump’s appearance the evening before with the prime minister of Japan had been “a show of strength… to all of planet Earth.”
Miller certainly had a way with words. And he upped the volume when he was asked about the decisions by federal judges across the United States to block the president’s executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“[We’re] considering new and further executive actions that will enhance the security posture of the United States,” he declared, while asserting that “the point, John, is that the president has enormous powers, both delegated to him by Congress and under the Constitution, his Article 2 foreign affairs power, to control the entry of aliens into our country and he’s going to use that authority to keep us safe.”
There would be no backing off, no backing down for Stephen Miller, as he robotically advanced ever more outlandish assertions. Dickerson asked, gingerly, whether the White House might have learned anything from the rollout of the executive order that was broadly acknowledged to have been a fiasco.
“Well,” said Miller, “I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is—is—is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Actually, the federal judge’s order in Seattle wasn’t “crazy” or “beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.” The respected jurist’s ruling had been upheld by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which determined that “the government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States.” Of particular note was the panel’s absolute rejection of the Trump administration’s expansive claim of executive power—a claim so vast that it suggested the courts should defer to the executive branch rather than review the case. The appeals court explained that “there is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.”
The senior advisor to the president was having none of this.
“The end result of this,” Miller said with regard to all the protests and legal rulings against the president’s order, “is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
“Well, I guess, let me step back,” said a startled Dickerson. “The question, as I talked to Republicans on the Hill, is what you’re learning inside the White House about the way you do things. It’s been pretty busy up there. Just stepping back, do you feel like you and your staff there, that you’re in control of events at the White House?”
“I think to say that we’re in control would be a substantial understatement,” declared Miller, who asserted that “the president of the United States has accomplished more in just a few weeks than many presidents accomplish in an entire administration. On issue after issue we’re taking forceful action to deliver on the president’s campaign promises on a breathtaking scale.”
Miller did not stop with Face the Nation. That same morning, he announced on Fox News Sunday that “in the end, the powers of the president of the United States will be reaffirmed.” He told NBC’s Meet the Press that the courts could not be permitted to “take power for themselves that belongs squarely in the hands of the president of the United States.” On ABC’s This Week, he said: “The bottom line is the president’s powers, in this area, represent the apex of executive authority.” Then he veered off into even more uncharted territory, telling host George Stephanopoulos, in the sternest of terms, that the president’s entirely debunked claim that he had lost the November popular vote because of massive voter fraud was not debunked at all. “George,” said Miller, who spoke in a theatrically threatening cadence, “it is a fact and you… will… not… deny… it that there are massive numbers of noncitizens in this country who are registered to vote. That is a scandal; we should stop the presses and as a country we should be aghast about the fact that you have people that have no right to vote in this country registered to vote canceling out the franchise of lawful citizens of this country. That’s the story we should be talking about and I am prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct one hundred percent.”
Stephanopoulos asked, repeatedly: “Do you have any evidence?” But Miller said it was not the time for facts and details, before spinning off new claims that were even more outlandish than those made by Trump. “Just for the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence,” concluded Stephanopoulos, who finally grew so frustrated with Miller that he cut off a final tirade from the presidential advisor by saying, “You can start by providing evidence to back up your claims. Thanks for joini
ng us this morning.”
Donald Trump feigned enthusiasm for his aide’s draconian appearances on the various networks (“Congratulations Stephen Miller—on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows,” read the presidential tweet. “Great job!”). But the fact was that Miller had scared people—and, worse yet from a political standpoint, his appearances had demanded mockery. Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, observed that Miller’s comments about presidential powers evidenced “a striking lack of understanding of the structure of our government.” Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough said the following morning on his MSNBC show that Miller’s apologias for Trump were “the talk of a dictator.” “That sounds like a spokesman for Vladimir Putin. It sounds like a spokesman out of Turkey.” The Washington Post review of the Face the Nation outburst was headlined “Stephen Miller’s authoritarian declaration: Trump’s national security actions ‘will not be questioned.’” A Chicago Tribune column found “Miller’s strident defense of unlimited presidential power” to be frightening but assured readers that the White House aide was an actual human being who seemed to believe what he was saying: “Yes, he looked robotic and overconfident… But Miller wasn’t reading a teleprompter. His well-articulated appetite for authoritarian rule leapt from his mind, not a machine.” Referring to the “will not be questioned” line, late-night comic Seth Meyers observed: “The only way that statement could be more terrifying is if he yelled it in German.” “‘Will not be questioned’?” asked Stephen Colbert. “Let me test that theory: What the [expletive] are you talking about?”