“I loved being in public service. I loved serving this country. I gave up millions of dollars to go into the White House.” So said Kellyanne Conway, a former senior counselor to Donald Trump, on Friday night’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.
While she may have conceived of this appearance as a victory lap, it’s more likely a farewell to relevance. When suggesting that, after Trump’s four years in office (featuring two impeachments) “you can’t deny that many people are better off,” Maher fired back, “Well, they’re not better off now, a lot of them are dead.”
Maher and Conway’s on-air relationship goes back to his old Comedy Central/ABC show Politically Incorrect, so it is unlikely that we’ve seen the last of her. “You are good at what you do,” he laughed when, after reading a litany of Trump’s transgressions, she fired back with some wonkish talk about charter schools.
She also had the temerity to suggest that Trump, he of locker room talk, was a shining example of an executive who respected women. “I’m happy I worked for a president who had the Oval Office door open to many of us, we could go in and express ourselves,” she said.
While condemning the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she pulled a #NotAllTrumpers, suggesting that the “troublemakers, thugs, and marauders” that invaded Washington, D.C. are not the same as those who merely vote every two or four years. She added a warning to “corporate America” that this larger group “consume goods and services every day.” (Maher seemed to agree with her on this point.) She also said that Trump people are currently on the receiving end of prejudice, mocked for how they they appear.
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