Not the Real New York Times

Conway: Trump Not Authorized to Speak for White House

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

January 11, 2018

WASHINGTON, D.C. — White House Communications Director Kellyanne Conway, stung by reports that President Donald Trump insulted would-be immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean at a meeting with Congressional leaders in the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, swiftly acted to dissociate Mr. Trump from the administration.

“Really,” Ms. Conway said to reporters, “Mr. Trump only played a minor role in the presidential campaign for a few weeks, and has done next to nothing since the inauguration. I barely know him myself. He does something in the East Wing, I think, involving television monitoring or food tasting.”

President Vladimir Vladiemirovich Putin toasting President Trump's inauguration a year ago. Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters.

The Wolff is at the door, but is that inside or outside?

Wolf attack. German engraving, 1517, via Wikipedia.

In March 2017, Kellyanne Conway is telling Olivia Nuzzi what she meant by the peculiar term she'd used in January to explain her contention that Donald Trump was right to claim that a million or million and a half people had attended his inaugural address in the National Mall, compared to a million for Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009, though aerial photos clearly showed a much smaller audience for Trump—the "alternative facts":

“Two plus two is four. Three plus one is four. Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty. Those are alternative facts,” she said, further defining the infamous phrase as “additional facts and alternative information.”

Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The expressions "3 + 1 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 4" aren't "alternative facts", they're alternative ways of stating a single fact. The numbers Sean Spicer proposed, 250,000 plus 220,000 plus another 250,000 for different regions of the Mall, don't add up to a million or more no matter how many times you calculate it, and the total 250,000 of the Vox estimate based on the photographs isn't an alternative way of saying "one million". It's a different number.

In April, Conway had refined the explanation, in an interview with Molly Ball:

Note on the Bowling Green massacre

We must keep "evil" out of our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017

Good idea! I always say, there's nothing worse than "evil". It's so great to have a country with no "evil" in it, we really should make an effort to keep it that way.


Kellyanne Thursday:

“I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” she said. “Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”

Friday:

One-percent solutions

You know who else was a fanatic about border protection?

Kellyanne Conway (via Tengrain, and credit for the headline):

“You’re talking about 325,000 people from overseas came into this country just yesterday through our airports... You’re talking about three hundred and some who have been detained or are prevented from gaining access to an aircraft in their home countries and must stay for now.”

“That’s 1 percent,” she pointed out. “And I think in terms of the upside being greater protection of our borders, of our people, it’s a small price to pay.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center:

By 1933, German Jews were largely urban, middle class, prosperous in business, and well represented in the professions (especially medicine and law). They were culturally integrated but represented less than 1 percent of the total population.

Conway's math is wrong, of course; if you accept her numbers, it's a tenth of one percent. But just sayin.

Outmatch them at every pass

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

It's just amazing, really, how willing people are to try to make an interpretation of the daily Trumpism, as if it were an oracle from the lips of the Pythoness high on laurel fumes or the Cumaean Sibyl, how they keep guessing how you could translate his gnomic utterance into their own technical language, looking for a clue as to what he might have in mind to do as president:

Kellyanne Jazz

Also an extraordinary actor, as in this face, where she manages to convey with that lift of the head and the ghost of her murdered smile that she's deeply pained by Bill Maher's discourtesy, but too brave to let it show, even as she's in fact letting it show. Screenshot via.

Kellyanne Conway, then:

he says he's for the little guy, but he's actually built a lot of his businesses on the backs of the little guy and he's—a lot of little guys through eminent domain, or through not paying contractors after you’ve built something. The little guys have suffered.

That's of course when she was working for a Cruz superPAC. Now she's working for the president-elect. Not worried whether she'll get paid or not. I guess she's not one of the little guys.

Or in the weird little montage (you can see it here) of her bullshitting even when she's speaking the truth, with which Stephanopoulos confronted her after she switched jobs in August:

Emperor Trump, continued

Image via Alabama Today, from a story on the nomination of Tom Price (R-GA) as secretary of destroying the Affordable Care Act. I have no idea why they ran this particular shot, unless Kellyanne wrote a song about it.

So it's my theory—trigger warning, this might make you feel a little sick—that the Romney concept really belongs to Barack Obama, as part of the Trump Whispering campaign.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember when Romney owned the world record for political lies per minute (about 0.76), but that was back in ancient times, before a presidential campaign in which Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina, some of the most prolific and dedicated liars in US history, making the Mittster look like a gentleman amateur, were themselves completely outclassed by the winning candidate, our president-elect, who reached the stunning rate of a lie every 50 seconds (1.2 lies per minute) during the presidential debates. (Oh, and both sides do it, because Hillary Clinton once said she landed under sniper fire in Sarajevo in 1996, which was not true, but then Brian Williams, who seems to have claimed to have spent pretty much his entire life under sniper fire, still has a job as a news broadcaster, so who knows what it all means.)