Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump –
with plenty of alternative facts
The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart,
readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truths
Lloyd Green
Sun 29 May
2022 07.00 BST
Kellyanne
Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed
and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit.
Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as
settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative
facts”.
Conway
strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of
staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.
Conway
labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a
boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with
the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she
told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.
“You were a
leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You
were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”
He got the
pardon anyway.
Some who
feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own
husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men,
Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to
reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.
“I may have
been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him
that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat
Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.
“If she had
I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could
go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz
Twitter, Truth Social.
But Trump
can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign
exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the
sycophant.
In 2019,
Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his
memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her
machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”
In Here’s
the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She
rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and
gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.
Left unsaid
is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention,
drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be
re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced
non-disclosure agreement in court.
On a matter
of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the
conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct
psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.
Rebekah
Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via
Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob
Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly
entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.
Like many
in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she
omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge
Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing
acquaintance.
Cambridge
Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon
to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum
about the Mercers’ ownership.
In 2016,
the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That
same year, the unseen hand of the company put its sticky fingers on the scales
of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia
launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica
data breach.
Here’s the
Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway
writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s
2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to
describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she
shares a desire to keep things “classy”.
Some
realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in
2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad
Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn
Joe Biden’s victory.
“The people
of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And
there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”
The only
thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer
he couldn’t refuse.
Kellyanne
Conway denies Trump press secretary lied: ‘He offered alternative facts’
Guardian
Unsurprisingly,
Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal
from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she
also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran
threatening nuclear breakout.
Hello,
alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and
denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join.
This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.
As for
Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s
withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear
weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a
cost.
Conway remains
in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in
2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve
Bannon. He could tell her some things.
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