Kellyanne Conway had a great weekend, with her husband being appointed to a key Justice Department position and not one but two massive profiles dropping in major magazines. If you don’t have time for those, though, why not instead take Super Deluxe’s two-minute journey into the depths of her mind? The video positions itself, like Vox’s similar recent video essay, as a look at the tactics and strategies she employs in interviews, but this one leaves most of the analysis to the viewer, consisting instead of a hyper-dense montage of appearances spliced together into a rich tapestry of evasion and misinformation. It is pure, undiluted Conway—the smiles, the barely suppressed rage, the winks, and, most importantly, the fumbling and recovery.
Indeed, the video builds into something of a climax hewn from the blank space created by the moments when she doesn’t have an answer for someone. Somehow, the confidence remains unflagging, perhaps because she knows she doesn’t need to land somewhere satisfactory. Once you’ve committed yourself to lying, there’s always a rhetorical escape hatch.