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There were many points where Kelian Conway could forcibly reject his boss Donald Trump’s claims that the election was marred by fraud. Of course, there were elections in 2016, after which Trump tried to circumvent the loss of votes by insisting that millions of people had somehow voted illegally. Conway, then in the White House, did not seem to object.
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Then there were the memorable Florida elections in 2018. Gov. Rick Scott (R), seeking an election in the Senate (as a member of the House of Representatives Ron DeSantis, who was looking for work) clung to a very small lead over his opponent. So Scott is very strong in saying that the ballots that are being counted in populated constituencies are an attempt to steal the election for his opponent – in order to stop this counting or simply to increase skepticism about the results. Trump eagerly agreed.
“The Florida election must be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, as a large number of new ballots came out of nowhere and many ballots are missing or falsified,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “A fair vote count is no longer possible – the ballots are infected en masse. It must be election night! ”
Very familiar rhetoric from Trump now, but it was not a standard part of his speech at the time. So the interviewers pressed people like Conway over him. George Stefanopoulos of ABC News, for example, asked her at the time if Trump had evidence for his allegations.
“The proof is that Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have won,” Conway said. She then raised questions about the Broward County election supervisor, where the vote count was under way – carefully raising Trump’s rhetorical point of view without specifically agreeing on conspiracy theories.
In his new book, Here’s the Deal, Conway does something similar about the 2020 election: he admits that Trump’s defeat was not clearly the result of unbridled illegal voting, but at the same time he repeats all anyway, the election was sketchy argues that Republicans are in the position from the end of 2020 to find some solid foundation between Trump’s base and reality.
But doesn’t Conway deserve some credit, at least for admitting that Trump didn’t win? Perhaps, except that the reason for this is as transparent as her reluctance to undermine Trump in 2018. Conway’s main point is that 2020. profitable from Trump – if there was a better campaign manager than the one who won his race in 2016. Which means: Kelian Conway.
The passage from Conway’s book that drew attention because of his deviation from the Trump line is this:
“Perhaps I was the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle to tell him that he had failed this time. This was not the result I wanted. That was not the result that about 74 million Americans – by far the largest number of people who have ever voted for an incumbent president – wanted. “
But this was immediately followed by this:
Equally sad and disturbing was the missed opportunity, which may have had to win a second term directly and, for the most part, avoid lawsuits, censuses, audits, court challenges, various machinations for a period of months and January 6, and spend 1 $ 4 billion from the huge election fund more sensibly, including for post-election legal strategy and a team worthy of an incumbent president, facing huge opposition and once a century forced by a global pandemic changes in who can vote, how and for how much time “
Pretty exquisite, isn’t it? The car dealer tells you that you wouldn’t have this problem with your tires if you just bought a Ford in the first place.
This is the turmoil in the world of consulting, of course. There is always a reason why the loss is not your fault or a victory, and it is always the case that something you were not hired for would have gone better if you had. Conway knows this, of course, and even applies it without irony to Trump’s campaign team.
“Acknowledging the defeat would force these advisers to give up future salaries,” she wrote. “Trump’s campaign raised $ 200 million after Nov. 3 to prove the election was stolen. A smooth transition and a focus on the president’s legacy would serve him and the country better.
If these advisors said they had lost a winning race, who would hire them? If they say they lost because of a scary boogie called Scam? Different situation.
Also note that Conway claims that some obscure organization called the Trump Campaign is maintaining a post-election vacuum over supporters’ wallets. A smooth transition would be better for Trump’s legacy, yes, but it’s not just advisers who are taking advantage of this massive post-election extraction. Trump is doing the same. The former president also wanted to keep his salary. He still does.
Again, Conway’s criticisms are only partial on allegations of fraud. It is primarily about the people who led Trump’s re-election.
“Stop the theft was the unifying cry for those who challenge the election results,” she wrote at another point. “But long before election day, the theft that had to be stopped was the one that put an indecent amount of money in the pockets of campaign consultants who failed to focus on Trump’s victory emphatically and to a large extent.
However, we return to the urgent issue of 2018. What did Conway do, in her opinion, to try to thwart efforts to claim that the election was tainted by fraud?
Well, she writes, she is the one who proposed Trump’s statement, proposed shortly after the election, to include the order that “every legitimate vote should be counted and illegal votes should not be counted” – falsely alluding to some huge cache of illegal ballots and a blurring of confidence in the votes, which were still outstanding. She says she told Trump that proving fraud is a difficult climb – and then advised him on how to try to present his case in court. She says she was given points to talk before a Fox News appearance on November 5, 2020, in which she was encouraged to say that Trump won Pennsylvania (which he apparently did not). She refused to do so.
However, what she said is interesting. She criticized an early Arizona network call for Joe Biden.
“Why are we in such a hurry to end this election prematurely? Let’s be patient. Let’s take a deep breath. “Let’s count every legitimate vote,” she said. “I think it’s time to be methodical, not emotional. Here’s what I think. And I think we need to expose some of the people in charge who were strongly anti-Trump. “
Blurring the water for the reliability of the released ballots. It hints at a conspiracy against Trump. And that, notice, since she no longer works for the president!
But the “why are we in a hurry” approach to Arizona is also important. In his book, Conway raises numerous complaints about the election that the Republican Party has been using since the end of the election to tell Trump voters they agree with their complaints about the outcome and to stay away from Trump’s conspiracy. theorizing.
“I understand the concerns that President Trump and millions of other Americans had about the election results,” she wrote. “It’s good – even American – to doubt whether your sacred voice has been counted correctly. And just because you question the election results or don’t trust the partisan activists fed by Zuck Bucks doesn’t mean you’re a QAnon Shaman. ”
She admits that those analyzing the 2020 election “have never proven this or how the presidential election was rigged” (although she also praises a book by Trump’s insidious ally entitled “Set”). But the blame for questioning the election results is once again at the feet of everyone but her and Trump.
“How do you make people disbelieve in the election results?” By changing the rules at the last minute, by accepting ballots long after the legal deadline, by sending ballots in the mail to people they didn’t ask for elections they don’t seem to care about until you show up at their door with a proposal to help them complete and deliver it, with the states giving you two months before election day to vote and then taking two weeks after election day to count the ballots. With every minute that passes without calculated and reported results, as states like Ohio, Florida and Vermont did on election night, the doubts will grow stronger. When a batch of votes for one candidate arrives in the middle of the night, it raises doubts. When survey staff put up a card to block viewing of the survey, it raises doubts. None of this is evidence of fraud or proof that the results are wrong. But all this undermines public faith in our elections. We need to make voting easier and harder to cheat. “
No, what undermines confidence in the election is insisting for months to convince people that these things are suspicious, as Trump did. What undermines trust is the insistence that the slow vote count in the states you lost is questionable, even when you’re on TV, demanding that people be patient and wait for the vote count to end in Arizona. What undermines the credibility of the system is the claim that it should be “harder to cheat,” which is a bit like insisting that we should make it harder for people not to be hit by a meteorite.
If Conway was the only person to tell Trump he was “wrong,” that didn’t seem to deter the president. Maybe because, as she told him that, she continued to allow his insistence that he wasn’t, by her own admission. Maybe because she had spent years giving him the opportunity in the same way, both in general and in particular with regard to his allegations of fraud.
However, as always for Conway, this book is the clever thing to say in public: that …
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