Kellyanne Conway has had her share of spats with the hosts of Morning Joe, and on Friday she appeared on multiple network morning shows to defend the president’s latest Twitter attack on them both.
On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted that “low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve,” and added that Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at the time — a comment that many women lawmakers have condemned as a sexist attack. Conway has become notorious for dodging questions about the president, and this time did not disappoint. Instead of addressing the content of Trump’s tweets, she pointed out that they’re a great way for him to communicate with the American people.
“It’s his way of cutting out the middle man,” she said on Fox & Friends. Then, on Good Morning America, she added that the president “sent out about roughly 160 tweets in the month of June … 120 or so of them were about policy, [which] gets very little coverage.” In other words, she asserted that Trump’s use of Twitter was a net positive, no matter what he said.
On Fox, she went on to beat her familiar Donald-Trump-is-great-for-women drum, saying, “I go by what people do, not what people say about them, [and] this is a man who for decades has been elevating women to the highest positions. This is a man who’s doing what he can do on behalf of America’s women.”
And she told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that, although she didn’t endorse the president’s tweets, she did endorse “his ability to fight back when he is attacked.” “It doesn’t help the American people to have a president covered in this light,” she continued. “I’m sorry. It’s neither productive nor patriotic. The toxicity is over the top.”
It’s become a sort of pattern for the White House to trot out its female spokespeople when the president is accused of sexism — yesterday Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Fox & Friends that the president felt “bullied” by Brzezinski, and who could forget Ivanka Trump proclaiming “my father is a feminist” after a poll showed that the majority of women voters disapproved of him. Conway, too, has repeatedly touted the president’s history of hiring women at his construction companies while ignoring the allegations of sexual misconduct that numerous women have made against him.
Meanwhile, Brzezinski and her co-host, Joe Scarborough, published an op-ed in the Washington Post Friday morning claiming that (a) the president is mentally unfit to hold office, and (b) he tried to blackmail them by threatening them with bad coverage in the National Enquirer — troll begets troll, as they say.
