The president and his closest allies have long proven themselves to attract controversy wherever they go, and the annual Easter Egg Roll held at the White House on Monday was no different.
Remarkably, before the event even began, the president set off controversy by spending the morning going after an array of interests on Twitter. His targets ranged from Mexico to the Department of Justice, which he complained wasn’t going along as much as he’d like it to with Congressional investigations into possible misconduct, in a tweet posted after he was supposed to already be at the Easter Egg Roll. The president and his allies have used such investigations to distract from the Russia probe.
Once the event actually began, his longtime adviser and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway decided to help her boss along with making the event as controversial as possible.
Addressing children who had gathered to hear her read a book — not spout political nonsense — Conway asked, pointing to the White House:
‘Do you know who lives there?’
After more brief interactions, Conway added:
‘Girls, we left open the first female president of the United States job, if you want it. I hope it comes in this generation.’
Watch the video below. After her initial comments, she read a copy of Lisa Tawn Bergren’s God Gave Us Easter.
Can she not go an hour without making a thinly veiled partisan attack on her boss’ political opponent? In so doing, she’s taken after her boss, who himself has infamously often referenced his victory over Hillary Clinton. To be clear, it’s been well over a year at this point since Trump beat Clinton via a thin margin in a few states granting him victory in the electoral college, and yet, here we are anyway. It’s not as though Barack Obama occupied himself with trying to drag John McCain through the mud after he was victorious.
The awkwardness from Conway isn’t the only way in which the members of the Trump team marked Monday’s White House Easter Egg Roll.
In addition, the president began the festivities by — after he finally finished tweeting and showed up — offering up some talking points about how great the military and economy are supposedly doing.
Besides the fact that the president has himself proven to have a questionable at best commitment to the military through such means as the recent report about him considering having the military pay for his long promised border wall, it’s also an open question how any of what he said was relevant to the crowd gathered for the Easter Egg Roll.
The point of the event isn’t to give the president an opportunity to spout off about how great he is, and the point isn’t to give his top adviser the chance to spout off about how terrible his opponent is, either, which is what she came incredibly close to doing early Monday.
Besides these issues, the irony here is that while Conway trumpets her vision of a female president in this generation, her boss remains credibly accused of sexual misconduct by numerous women and has a long history of promoting sexism.
Featured Image via Cheriss May/ NurPhoto via Getty Images
