racism

Kellyanne Conway Accusingly Asks Reporter: ‘What’s Your Ethnicity?’

Conway wanders off into a racially explosive Twilight Zone. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s racist tweets this week have made life a bit difficult for his various spin doctors. One of the most prominent, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, held a press availability today, and in her efforts to defend The Boss’s smears of four nonwhite Democratic members of Congress, she went right into the Twilight Zone:

It’s unclear where Conway was trying to go with this. Was she suggesting that anyone might be told to “go home” if they work in Fake Media? Was she insinuating something specific about Feinberg’s background, or hinting he should “go home” as well? Or was the idea to make it clear Trump actually did know the women he attacked were U.S. citizens — three of whom who were born right here in the USA — which would only make the racism of his insinuation more apparent?

Beats me. The fact that she then went into an angry, incoherent tirade about being “sick and tired of our military being denigrated” and lurched into an attack on “Hollywood D-Listers having nothing better to do than to sit on their asses on Twitter all day” suggests that she knew she had really screwed up and needed to throw some sand into everyone’s eyes. Or maybe the heat got to her. Or perhaps she was unsettled by her husband’s Washington Post op-ed on this same subject that included this passage:

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.


But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core.

Kellyanne Conway is in a really strange position to be angrily denouncing suspicions that Trump’s motives in going after the Squad were innocent.

Kellyanne Conway Asks Reporter: ‘What’s Your Ethnicity?’