Kellyanne Conway, a wraith who escaped Roger Ailes’ daydreams to exact its revenge upon America, has long put a rictus smile on the Trump administration’s endless stream of bullshit, quickly distinguishing herself among the president’s team with her aptitude for making utter mendacity look sunny and breezy. But according to Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, Conway is only spinning those obfuscating lies in front of television cameras for the money and fame, and knows deep down that what she’s doing is wrong.
“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say ‘bleeech I need to take a shower’ because she disliked her candidate so much,” Brzezinski said this morning, insinuating that Conway’s defense of Trump’s various misdeeds is born out of something besides genuine personal affection for her boss.
Concurring with his co-host (and newly minted fiancée), Scarborough said Conway—who spent most of the primary season castigating Trump for the very things she would now refer to as ”negativity”—would often aver that her time with Trump was only temporary, believing, like so many, that his campaign would be the end of it: “[She said] ‘I’ll be off this soon’—I don’t know that she ever said I’m doing this for the money, but she said, ‘This is my summer vacation, my summer in Europe, and basically, I’m gonna get through this,’” Scarborough alleged of Conway’s apparently Hostel-inspired worldview.
Both hosts also noticed that, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, Conway began referring to Trump as “my client,” with Scarborough adding, “My client. I’m separating, I don’t believe in this guy, he’s just my client, it’s just a paycheck.” It’s a fairly damning charge, suggesting that Kellyanne Conway still has some vestige of a conscience—one that, if true, could prove devastating to her political career.
This isn’t the first, nor surely the last time Scarborough and Brzezinski have gone after Conway, with the two formally banning her from the show back in March for what they derided as her total lack of credibility. Last Friday, the MSNBC hosts also chastised CNN for continuing to invite her on, which they say is only out of a shameful desire for “politics porn” and “ratings crack,” shaming their colleagues by saying, “There’s nothing that she brings to the table that’s honest.” It was an admirable call, at long last, for some integrity in cable news, albeit one offered by two people who were once so friendly and welcoming to Trump that he invited them to lunch at the White House and offered to officiate their wedding. But of course, at the time they were probably just going through their own European vacation. We all summer in Europe from time to time, no?
While she has yet to respond directly to today’s accusations, Conway most recently sat down for an interview with Fox News’ Howard Kurtz, where she once again attacked the media for being unfairly critical, and called Anderson Cooper’s recent eye-roll “possibly sexist” and “definitely what I call Trumpist.” It was a statement that, depending on the truth of these latest allegations, possibly provoked the slightest spark of shame, which was then smothered immediately beneath her all-consuming desire for power.