As the nation tries to figure out who wrote the scathing New York Times op-ed about how amoral and unfit Donald Trump is to serve as POTUS, panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe threw out the possibility that it’s Kellyanne Conway.
Guest John Heilamann cited a column in Esquire in which the author, Charles Pierce, wrote that his wife noticed a feminine tone and wondered if Conway was the person behind the op-ed.
Heilmann said his first guess was Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, but that Pierce’s theory was plausible:
“The more you think about it, the more Kellyanne Conway makes some sense,” he said. “She’s very cagey, she’s the kind of person who would find out that Mike Pence used the word ‘lodestar’ a lot and put it in to try to pin it on Mike Pence.”
“If you think about the double act doing with her husband, trying to set herself up to the be Carville and Matalin of the future, this is a good hedge against Trump failing,” Heilmann continued. “She would be the kind of person who would want to come out after Trump failed and say, ‘You know what? I was working on the inside the whole time.’”
Joe Scarborough noted that, while she was Trump’s campaign manager, she distanced herself from him, saying, “At the end of the campaign she would, in the green room, around the set, talk about how she couldn’t wait for the campaign to be over, this was like her summer abroad.”
Panelist Donny Deutsch chimed in with, “In Daytona Beach, I was doing the show with you that day, we were on the break. said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘It’s like vacation at Daytona Beach, it’s like being on the beach with all the kids, that’s how crazy this is.’”
Deutsch said, “Who is cunning and clever enough to use the word, a Pence word, to throw people and who in the post-Trump administration has most to lose?” Deutsch said. “They’ll all go back to their political worlds, think tanks. If you are somebody who wants to be on television, in the communications world, whatnot, you really have to re-invent yourself. Mike Pompeo does not have to re-invent himself.”
Scarborough pointed out that working in the Trump administration is a detriment to one’s political career, “Look at others that have left the White House, except for one or two, they ain’t working in Washington anymore. They’ve destroyed their reputations. They might as well go back home, because no administration will ever hire them again.”
Heilemann opined that whoever wrote the NYT piece has a strong and sophisticated understanding of how to use the media, and he sees that as another possible clue. “Have somebody pull her denial yesterday, which is not in the category of denials where she’s trashing the person,” Heilemann argued. “It’s a denial, but it’s a pretty soft denial.”
Watch the conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=232&v=m4ZW5oN8YqA
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