Former President Donald Trump on Thursday morning personally lashed out at Kellyanne Conway over her new memoir, Here’s The Deal, in which she recalled telling the ex-president that he definitively lost the 2020 election.
While the first Team Trump rebuke of Conway and her book came earlier this week via a spokesperson, this latest lashing was posted by Trump himself to his Truth Social platform.
“Kellyanne Conway never told me that she thought we lost the election. If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer - she would have been wrong - could go back to her crazy husband,” Trump wrote, referring to his former adviser and campaign manager’s fervently anti-Trump husband George Conway. “Writing books can make people say some very strange things.”
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In the book, Conway claims to have been one of the first advisers to tell Trump that he lost the election he has since maintained was “stolen” from him. “I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway wrote. She did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Thursday.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Conway took aim at the advisers who surrounded Trump and who continually echoed and enabled his disastrous and baseless claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” via widespread voter fraud.
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“Rather than accepting responsibility for the loss, they played along and lent full-throated encouragement (privately, not on TV) when Trump kept insisting he won,” she recalled. “The team had failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due. Instead supplicant after sycophant after showman genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver.”
This isn’t the first time Team Trump has tossed cold water on some of the claims in Conway’s book.
As exclusively reported by The Daily Beast over the weekend, Conway alleged that, in October 2016, amid the fallout from the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump mulled quitting the election. “Should I get out [of the race]?” Conway recalled Trump asking her on the night of Oct. 8, while he further pondered: “Will I lose? Will we lose? Can we still win?”
Following that report, Trump’s chief spokesperson Liz Harrington told The Daily Beast that Conway’s claims about that conversation were “totally false.”
“I don’t need to be lectured by spokespeople who weren’t there and certainly didn’t help him win,” Conway told The Daily Beast in response.
