Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway piled into the university admissions scandal Tuesday night, making a highly personal attack against the children of actresses and vocal Trump critics Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who have been named as being among those implicated in a massive cheating scandal aimed at getting their children into elite universities.
Conway appeared to be following the lead of Donald Trump Jr. who accused “everyone in Hollywood” of being “strangely silent” on the issue, saying, “Come on guys you’re always very vocal in forcing your opinions on everyone... What changed?”
Critics on social media were quick to point out that the President sent his children to University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—making generous six-figure donations around the same time. Michael Cohen testified before Congress that he had threatened the president’s old schools against leaking his test and SAT scores. Don Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner was reportedly admitted to Harvard right around the time his dad Charles donated $2.5million.
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What could explain Conway’s ire?
Observers note that Huffman has been a particularly vocal and outspoken critic of the Trump presidency.
She took part in the women’s march on Washington after he was elected to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration, saying, “I feel that the election was somewhat of a feminist issue. I feel like the best of us was bested by not the best of them.”
The cheating scandal has rocked the competitive world of university admissions.
The FBI alleges that parents used a private admissions and tutoring company to improve their children’s chances of getting accepted by top schools.
Huge sums of money dressed up as donations were in fact bribes, investigators say.
They also allege that admissions coaches ordered kids to fake learning disabilities, wrote essays on behalf of the applicants and even created fake photographs of the children in moments of sporting triumph to get into to schools such as Yale, the University of Southern California and Georgetown.
Conway also criticized the other 48 people charged in the plot in a follow-up tweet, in which she appeared to take aim at those who chose to focus heavily on the involvement of Huffman and Loughlin, as she had just done moments before.
