Kellyanne Conway Shocked, Shocked to Learn Trump Campaign Gave White Supremacists a Platform

Photo via AP

A roundtable discussion between the top aides of the Trump and Clinton campaigns at Harvard’s Institute of Politics devolved into a shouting match Thursday night, a disquieting portent of the divisiveness bound to characterize the next four years.

Every four years since 1972, presidential campaign managers from both sides gather at the Kennedy School to reflect and unpack lessons learned on the trail. This year’s conference, indicative of the hellacious campaign that preceded it, got nasty.

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

“Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?” said Conway, who ran a campaign endorsed by David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and a whole slew of Neo-Nazis; led by a man who, when not presiding over the site that called for the Confederate flag to be flown “high and proud” following the massacre of a black church in Charleston, reportedly muses about genetic superiority and whether denying the right to vote to non-property owning black folk might be “not such a bad thing“; and centered on a candidate who, years before leading the charge to discredit the country’s first black president by falsely claiming he was born in Kenya, was sued by the federal government for refusing to rent apartments to black tenants.

Still, Conway had valid criticisms of the Clinton campaign, whose failure campaign manager Robby Mook partially blamed on interference from Russian agents. “Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white working class voters?” she said, calling the former secretary of state “most joyless presidential candidates in history.”

“How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?” Conway said.

How much the white working class voters have in common with a billionaire reality TV star married to a supermodel in a gilded penthouse atop Manhattan, however, remains to be seen.

You can listen to the full audio of the discussion below.