“I’m not one to run around screaming about sexism,” Kellyanne Conway told The New Yorker in October, shortly after the release of the Access Hollywood tape that almost sunk her candidate. “[But] I thought that was really sexist.”
At the time, she was referring to a BuzzFeed News article about her position in the Trump campaign. But the presidential counselor has since declared a number of other criticisms of her to be “sexist,” including an eye roll by Anderson Cooper and a Morning Joe report that the president was displeased with her. Conway made the same point at a conservative event on Saturday, where she said that much of the criticism of her is “gender-based.”
When evangelical political activist Bob Vander Plaats asked Conway about the response she’s gotten from “the left” in regards to her being the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign, Conway replied that she’d been “disappointed” by the lack of respect she’d received.
“If you want to disagree on policy … then say that,” she said. “But so much of the criticism of me is so gender-based.” She went on, “If they’re going to criticize policy, that’s one thing. But criticizing how I look or what I wear or how I speak, it’s really remarkable and it totally undercuts modern feminism saying that they’re for women.”
Interestingly, Conway hasn’t given the same weight to sexism faced by Hillary Clinton, or by any number of women at the hands of the candidate she shilled for. “Hillary Clinton is in search of sexism as a lame excuse for why her disastrous candidacy and campaign lost six months ago,” she said on CNN in May, while she’s deflected all allegations of Trump’s misogyny with either, “but he hires women!” or “the Clintons are much worse.”
At the summit, Conway also said that she has “great relationships with some of the female Democratic senators and members of Congress. We respect each other, and we respect the fact that we live in a nation where we all, particularly women, can disagree.”
“I would worry for the country that all that noise and venom and rancor just seeps into our consciousness constantly,” she added. Huh — wonder whose fault that is.
