This Wednesday at the White House, longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway absolutely melted down when a reporter asked a simple question about whether President Donald Trump himself would condemn “white power.” Trump recently posted a video on his Twitter feed in which one of his supporters shouted the phrase, but he took down the video, and his team claimed he’d not heard the phrase before posting the clip. The president “accidentally” posting a video including someone shouting “white power” and failing to personally address the issue for days afterward is a big story, but Kellyanne acted gravely offended that a reporter dared to bring it up.
One of the most hilariously unhinged parts is when she suggested, towards the end of her remarks, that reporters would be ashamed if she looked at their own Twitter feeds. Thus, she seemed to suggest, they had little grounds to criticize the president. Kellyanne does know who she works for, right? She does know that Trump has defined his time in office with a never-ending stream of outrageous insults that he’s posted on Twitter, right?
When asked about the racist “white power” tweet, Conway ranted:
‘He condemned it by taking it down. He never heard that. He doesn’t support that phrase. This is a president that has worked for all Americans. If you’re not going to cover the other side of the coin, respectfully, everything he’s done for African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, vulnerable populations like seniors, those who live in nursing homes, kids… You just want to talk about white power!
And what are those supposed great steps for marginalized communities, exactly? Before the Coronavirus pandemic sent the economy spiraling, Trump liked to cite low unemployment among black Americans, but the trendline was already established under Obama’s administration.
Conway complained that the story of Trump’s tweet with the phrase “white power” was supposedly three days old, but the reporter noted:
‘It’s not a three-day-old story, because there’s been a moment of reckoning on race in this country that’s been going on now for weeks. And the president still hasn’t come out and condemned it.’
Conway eventually followed up:
‘Yes, we have to have an ongoing conversation. I have that conversation with my own children. Of course we should have it as a nation. But if you’re just going to throw out the Sesame Street word of the day and expect us to have a conversation, that’s not how to have a conversation.’
Watch below:
She sounds incredibly ignorantly condescending, plain and simple. It’s worth noting — at least one of Conway’s kids seems to be actually more politically aware than she is. Just this week, social media posts from Kellyanne’s daughter Claudia circulated widely. In the posts, she mocks Trump big time.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway's 15-year-old daughter Claudia was not expecting the wave of support she got after TikTok videos opposing her mom's boss went viral. https://t.co/UaeepOeEb3
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 1, 2020
