This week, there has been much speculation that Vice President Mike Pence could be behind the anonymous New York Times op-ed that deemed President Donald Trump unfit for office. But according to the Morning Joe crew, that’s what Kellyanne Conway wants you to think.
“We have figured out who’s anonymous,” Joe Scarborough said, tongue barely in cheek, Friday morning. He then turned things over to John Heilemann, who cited a piece by Charles Pierce in Esquire in which he revealed his wife’s theory that Conway wrote the op-ed. The main piece of evidence? “There is something unmistakably feminine in the tone.”
“The more you think about it, the more Kellyanne Conway makes some sense,” Heilemann added. “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 ‘lodestar’ in to try to pin it on Mike Pence.”
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On top of that, he continued, “If you think about the double act she’s 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 because 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 for the resistance all along.'”
Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed totally convinced by these arguments and added that when Conway would appear on their show during the 2016 campaign she would privately complain to them in the green room about how she couldn’t wait for the race to be over—assuming like most that Trump would lose.
“I agree,” Donny Deutsch chimed in. “Who is cunning and clever enough to use the word, a Pence word, to throw people and who in the post-Trump administration has the most to lose?”
“The alternative facts woman,” Brzezinski answered.
“They’ll all go back to their political worlds, think tanks,” Deutsch said. “But if you are somebody who wants to be on television, in the communications world, you really have to reinvent yourself. Mike Pompeo does not have to reinvent himself.”
The final piece of evidence presented by Heilemann is that, unlike many other high-level administration officials, Conway gave a “pretty soft denial” when asked if she wrote the op-ed.
“Of course not,” Conway told NBC News when asked if she was the author, but she did not dispute its content or call on the person who wrote it to be fired as others have. Meanwhile, her husband George Conway retweeted the piece multiple times and when she was asked about it on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show Wednesday night, Conway said she’s “not really sure it matters” who wrote it.
