The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220526_outrageous-media-behavior-and-balancing-white-hous

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May 26, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Mourn Uvalde Victims 00:04:13
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	As the nation continues to mourn the young lives lost in Uvalde, Texas, we are learning more about the shooters' chilling final messages, missed warning signs, and police response.
	The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, saying that investigators found social media messages the gunman sent to a teenager in Germany he had met online.
	He was apparently upset with his grandmother over an issue with his phone bill.
	So he wrote to the girl, I just shot my grandma in the head.
	He then messaged her again, writing, I'm a go-shoot up an elementary school.
	The timeline of events is still very unclear, but according to multiple news outlets, the shooter was inside the school for roughly an hour.
	And there are questions about whether that was too long and the frustration of parents on the outside.
	My guest today is somebody with a vast wealth of experience in politics and indeed in the White House.
	She was part of a White House administration when tragedies like this happened, including what happened down at Parkland in Florida.
	She's also the author of a brand new book called Here's the Deal: Kellyanne Conway.
	Welcome to the show.
	So good to have you here.
	Megan, it's a real pleasure.
	Thanks for having me.
	And you're just so right about how we all mourn and grieve with the people of Uvalde, Texas.
	It's senseless.
	It's moral depravity.
	It's evil.
	It's every parent and frankly, every non-parent's a worst fear.
	It should not be an occupational hazard for children when they go to school.
	And you're right about Parkland, Florida.
	That was a very tough moment.
	We invited the Parkland families to the White House.
	We were with them in the state dining room for an extended conversation.
	I also flew with President Trump to Texas after there was a school shooting there, and we met with parents there.
	And there's hardly anything you can say that will ever make them whole again.
	In fact, there's nothing you can say.
	But it's very important that people understand that folks in leadership, like the President of the United States, are listening and are with them all the way, not just when it's in the news, not just when it's fresh, but many days after that.
	Yeah, you know, it's that role of comforter-in-chief.
	It's not always easy.
	I mean, the president's just a human being and may have his own personal reactions to the horror that we see unfolding, which is one of the unfortunate things about the fact that Joe Biden got political the other night.
	You know, he's very anti-gun, and he used this as an opportunity to push that agenda.
	My own personal view of it, Kellyanne, was there's a time for that.
	His first remarks to the nation was not that time.
	It would have been nice if he had just had one unifying message about mourning, the value of life, you know, the love one has for one's children.
	And he started off on that note, and then it turned.
	And that's where it remains.
	What are your thoughts on it?
	You're 100% right.
	I was very disappointed.
	I watched the president live and I happened to be on live television, Megan.
	When the news brought you to the game, I heard you.
	I heard you.
	You were on the five.
	Yes, I was.
	I was on the five on Fox News channel.
	And we transitioned, of course, the entire show went to that.
	And I was trying to ask questions of the FBI agent, of the reporter who was on the scene, et cetera.
	And I really warned people then not to speculate and not to walk on these fallen angels' bodies for their own political gain.
	Of course, people don't listen to that.
	They don't know anything else.
	And I thought in the case of President Biden, as somebody who, God forbid, Megan, has experienced the loss of two of his children, that he could empathize with these parents, these families, that community, much more than maybe the average person.
	But it quickly turned political.
	It quickly turned about something that was so inappropriate, given the fact that we weren't even sure at that moment.
Politician's Hubris Exposed 00:03:57
	And he would know the best as the president.
	We weren't even sure at that moment that families had been totally reunited with their missing children.
	And of course, then the parents are going to be asked to identify their fallen children.
	So so much of it is fraught.
	And I think it's one of those many instances, Megan, where less is more.
	Yeah.
	And it is incredibly disappointing.
	And when you compare that also to what Beto Work did the very next day, I mean, that is unspeakable in a different way because I think Beto or Work is the worst example of how this got politicized.
	Here is someone, Megan, who was in Congress, then ran for Senate and lost, then ran for President of the United States and lost, got as many electoral votes as Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, which is to say zero.
	Right.
	And now is running for governor of Texas and will lose and just shows up there, doesn't say, hey, I've got kids 15, 13, and 11, which he does.
	Hey, I've been away from them running for political office unsuccessfully for years.
	Well, my wife's been raising them.
	That's an aside.
	But guess what?
	He doesn't say any of that.
	He just started screaming at them because he knew the cameras were on.
	He knew it was a lie.
	Wait, let me show it to the audience, Kelly.
	And hold that thought because I want you to continue, but I just want to clue people in on what we're talking about in case they haven't seen it.
	He showed up yesterday at a press conference with Governor Abbott and the mayor of Uvalde and other local officials trying to brief the community on the latest.
	And he made it about himself.
	He was off mic, but you can hear him yelling.
	And then you can hear the mayor of Uvalde giving it right back to him.
	Take a listen.
	Excuse me.
	Sit down.
	You're out of line.
	It's right now.
	And you're doing nothing.
	No.
	Sir, you're out of line.
	Sir, you're out of line.
	I'm sure.
	You are out of line.
	Please leave this auditorium.
	So you can exit.
	I can't believe you're a sick son of a bitch that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.
	He's walking away.
	He stops.
	He yells again.
	And that's it.
	He exits.
	So, Kellyanne, the comments, this is on you.
	This was totally predictable.
	It was?
	Does he know something we don't know?
	Well, if he did, he should have come forward.
	And that's always the mystery of some of these more radical Democrats who are there for political purposes.
	And Megan, for all we know, it's probably the probability that there were family members of the fallen angels who were watching that press conference trying to get information.
	Yes.
	And there he is making it even worse.
	And one other thing, if I see that footage for his face in a political ad or a fundraising piece, I'm going to come back on the show and we're going to talk about it, if I may, because that would be the biggest disgrace of a disgrace.
	And as I want to say, let's just review who he is very quickly.
	When he ran for president, he was on the cover of Vanity Fair saying, I was born to do this.
	Well, it turns out he really was.
	He's born to fail as a political recidivist candidate every chance he gets.
	That edition of Vanity Fair, which should have been called Vanity Project for him, was basically still in the newsstands when he dropped out of the race in 2019.
	This is somebody who made us watch him fry a burger, get a root canal, be on his skateboard.
	He's a narcissist in the worst possible way.
	And guess what?
	If he wants to be a narcissist, if he wants to be a career politician, have at it.
	This is America, pal.
Blame Game Unfolds 00:13:49
	But you don't do that at a time when people are literally grieving.
	Their lives will never be the same.
	And again, watch your TV screen.
	If that's in an ad, if those pictures appear in a fundraising appeal, that is the worst of the worst.
	That would be 100% disqualifying, as this by itself might be to interrupt the flow of information to grieving family and community members to make it about yourself, yourself.
	I mean, it's rare when a politician can shock you with his hubris, but it happened.
	It happened.
	So that's him.
	I mean, it's like yet another day for him because that's not the first time and it probably won't be the last, but the people of Texas will hopefully remember how he behaved there.
	I do want to ask you just one word about there's sort of a blame game unfolding now in Texas, separate and apart from did we know much about the shooter and all that.
	There are reports now that the police may have been outside of that school for over an hour, not going in.
	There are conflicting reports about it.
	First, they said they ran in, they ran in after the shooter and some got shot and then they took time to set up a perimeter.
	And then finally law enforcement came up, Border Patrol agent, heroic guy ran in there and shot him.
	Now you're having parents who are outside directly accuse the cops of not going in, that they were talking amongst themselves about storming the school because they heard gunshots and the cops weren't going in.
	You never know in a situation like this, Kellyanne, you know, what happened.
	And that's the one thing that the public information officer wouldn't disclose yesterday.
	He was asked about the timeline.
	He was very open about the events as they unfolded, but not the timeline.
	And it makes me feel a little uncomfortable just talking about it because you hate to condemn law enforcement in a situation like this.
	But, you know, when there are children inside, there's going to be fallout from this if they did delay.
	Well, this happened in Parkland, of course.
	We saw this on videotape, and I don't know what happened there.
	I'm not an eyewitness.
	I'm not, I can't talk about the facts in real time, but I am listening to those parents and others who were outside of the building, Megan, and what they are reporting were the facts at the time.
	I think the reason the public information officer is not coming forth is because let's remind ourselves, this is an active investigation.
	This is a crime scene.
	And they can't really, I think what I appreciate about what the school district has done so far, that woman who's very, she's very good at her job.
	I don't know her name.
	I apologize to her.
	She comes up and says, we're making a statement.
	We're not taking questions.
	I think that was the right way to handle it in those first hours or days, because if you start taking questions, you don't know the answer to, you can make the situation worse.
	We need facts here.
	None of this will ever make sense to any of us, the moral depravity, the evil.
	But we need facts.
	And unfortunately, this would not be the first time, if it is true, that we see people whose jobs it is to go in and disrupt an active shooter or even just investigate an allegation or a hint of trouble.
	not doing that, you know, time is of the essence in matters like this.
	This is why people are calling for the doors to be locked, armed guards to be there, retired police officers, security professionals to be hired.
	And I have read in the news accounts in the last 12 or 15 hours, Megan, I'm sure you have, that there was a guard, there was a school guard.
	He had a confrontation with the shooter.
	So we're not even sure what happened there.
	And as this unfolds, but time is of the essence.
	And you're so right.
	Law enforcement is already so denigrating, castigated all across this country by people spitting on them, pigs frying them up like bacon, these radical lefties calling for defunding the police and the firefighters who are running into burning buildings and towards gunfire when the rest of us are running away from it.
	So hopefully we can get some answers here.
	And whatever the facts are, it is not to be projected onto everybody who holds that job all across this country.
	But our kids, and you know, Megan, I was live on the five the other day when this is unfolding and I was very careful to not speculate, very careful to not be out of my depth in what I was saying.
	But the one thing I did say that I'm going to stick with here because I did some research last night.
	Megan, we have so much leftover COVID money for the schools, billions.
	Take that money, everybody, have a vote in Congress today.
	Have Joe Biden sign it if he needs to.
	Take that money and shift it over to securing our schools.
	Stop pretending that we can't with the same amount of vigor and gusto that we used to protect them from a virus, we can protect them from violence.
	We need to do that.
	That's a great point.
	I mean, we can find the money we just gave, what, 40 billion to Ukraine.
	We have this extra money already sitting there in the pot for schools that are no longer dealing with a serious COVID threat.
	So why not reallocate?
	Why not shore it up?
	These are soft targets, you know, and the most fruitful place for a madman with a gun is a place that's a gun-free zone, like most schools are.
	So it's not that every teacher needs to carry.
	I understand that that can be fraught, you know, trying to say like, let's arm all the teachers.
	I know a lot of teachers who would never want to touch a gun.
	You know, like they know that it'd be used against them as opposed to by them.
	But security officers on campus who are well trained and at the ready, that's a different story.
	Can I ask you about Parkland though?
	Because I do wonder, of course, now the national debate has shifted to what can we do?
	And to some extent, to a large extent, I think it's this is just a comfort measure because in a free country of 330 million people with 400 million guns, we're just not going to get rid of the guns.
	And we're not going to get rid of every psycho with a desire to kill.
	I think we can do better.
	We can do better.
	But having lived through Parkland and the administration, what was the debate like?
	What are your thoughts on whether there are real reforms yet to be had that we could implement, you know, that would make a difference?
	What do you think?
	Megan, especially after Parkland, and of course after Newtown, Sandy Hook, God rest their souls.
	But after Parkland, there was a raging debate for quite a while and it extended into many, many months.
	And I was part of that.
	I was part of the group that was working on that.
	And it also included a number of Democratic senators.
	I remember going back to the dining room with where the president was.
	And I was called in there for a meeting.
	And he was on the phone with two Democratic senators, one of whom was Governor, excuse me, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who was again in the well of the Senate the other day screaming about he's so sick and tired of this, do something.
	You know, Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Joe Biden as president, they sound like people who just got there.
	They don't sound like people who have been in office who could have quote done something before, those who want us to do something for years.
	And in the case of Joe Biden, Megan, five decades.
	So they sound like people who just got elected yesterday and took their seats and said, you know what, I'm going to work on first this.
	And so it strikes many people as disingenuous and opportunistic and always reactive, not reflective.
	After Parkland, many different debates, red flag laws, and certainly what happened in Parkland happened in Newtown, now just sadly happened in Uvalde.
	You do see a certain profile of the shooter.
	We see that they're loners, they have some domestic issues, they are isolated.
	Maybe some of them were bullied.
	There is no excuse for their depraved, evil, criminal behavior.
	No excuse for it.
	We are looking at a profile, though.
	Where were the warning signs?
	These kids are all over social media.
	Why are we monitoring?
	Why are we monitoring speech in terms of the woke agenda in terms of what did you say?
	What did you mean?
	Calling each other names rather than wanting to know each other's names, looking each other in the eye offline and having conversations like we are now.
	Why all of that versus what are the warning signs?
	Parkland was particularly vexing and frustrating and maddening, Megan, because in that instance, that shooter, Nicholas Cruz, that murderer, he had been on social media time and time again, showing his weaponry, saying, I'd like to shoot up a school.
	You know, he aspired to be a school shooter and eventually got his wish.
	Also, the FBI had visited the different homes he had lived in dozens and dozens of times and did not take sufficient action to have extracted this troubled individual from society in a way that would obviously help him and protect everyone else.
	So there are many different shoots and ladders here.
	And when people go down just one rabbit hole or one path, it's actually insulting because they're excluding all the other possibilities.
	That's right.
	And the thing is, so the warning signs are there and the thing, they always go to the guns, right?
	They always go to the guns.
	But the Justice Department actually just released a study not long ago that took a comprehensive look at school shootings since 1966.
	And they concluded that the vast majority of school shooters get their guns from their parents' gun cabinet.
	That's how, so all these background checks and it's like, you know what?
	Those aren't going to help.
	They're not going to apply.
	And even Texas, Texas has got a law that says you can get a long gun if you're 18, but not like a pistol until you're 21.
	A couple of other states have the same because a lot of people are saying, why was he able to even get a long gun on AR-15 at 18?
	Well, some states have said, you know what, let's raise that to 21.
	And they've fallen in the courts.
	Those regulations are being struck down based on Second Amendment grounds that there's a constitutional right.
	When you're 18 years old, you're an adult in the eyes of the law, maybe not to drink, but that's not a constitutional right, right?
	So it's anyway, there's not that much more that Texas could have done.
	But my point is, Kellyanne, I know the Democrats always look at the Republicans and say guns, guns, guns.
	But what about looking at the Democrats and saying, what about mental health reform?
	And I'm going to say it, mandatory confinement for mental health risks, people who pose a risk to the rest of our civil liberties.
	We're so concerned about the civil liberties of, you know, the people who may be struggling mentally and emotionally because we have a bad history in this department back, you know, 50 plus years ago.
	We've forgotten.
	What about the civil liberties of the little 10-year-old girls who were killed yesterday?
	Yes.
	Megan, you're absolutely right.
	You would have been completely right during Parkland and pre-pandemic, but you are especially correct now.
	Post-pandemic, we've seen the statistics.
	We've heard from Gen Z themselves.
	They talk to pollsters and they say that they're struggling with their mental health, their emotional development, their lost learning, their inability to form and retain healthy, successful relationships with peers or with adults, supervisors, teachers, role models, people of faith leaders, whoever it is, community leaders.
	They are reaching out, crying out for help, and we are ignoring them.
	Now, some of the money I just mentioned to you that was left over from COVID for the schools is designated for mental health.
	There's a great Wall Street Journal article just this week.
	Everybody can pull it up, basically saying about 92% of the $113 billion or so that we designated or President Biden designated last year for COVID-related school matters is unspent.
	And so some of it was for mental health.
	Let's get that.
	Let's get those folks in there.
	Let's get them the help they need.
	This is a true crisis and epidemic, and we are ignoring it.
	Why?
	Why are we looking the other way?
	Why are we so quick to judge and malign and try to cancel people based on what you think they meant by what they said and not staring right in the eyes of our mental health crisis?
	Is anyone going to argue that the three shooters we just talked about in Newtown, in Parkland, in Uvalde, let alone others?
	We could talk about Pulse Nightclub.
	We can talk about Dayton.
	We could talk about El Paso.
	We could talk about Columbia.
	We can talk about Aurora, Colorado.
	The list, of course, goes on and on.
	But we know that there are some common denominators here because those who survive tell us and those who don't survive, the shooters who survive basically tell us.
	And those who don't survive have left a long sort of portfolio and trail of everything that was going wrong.
	Look, as I want to say again, there's no excuse for any of them.
	This is moral depravity.
	This is evil on an entirely different level that we can't even begin to comprehend.
	There are people out there who are suffering from mental health who are not going to be the next school shooter.
	They're suffering now.
	We need to make sure this is part of the part of the curriculum, part of what we're doing for our young people.
	Too much screen time is school time.
	Too much access to drugs, to isolation, to bullying, to just feeling less than, frankly.
	And yes, I think there is a role for the tech companies, Megan, who profit to the tune of billions and billions of dollars off of our kids' use of social media, but also offer their misery.
	I think I would love for them to come forward and pick up on the congressional, sworn congressional testimony where some of them admitted that they know what works with teenage girls and how to get into their heads through social media.
	I want them to step up on their own and do more.
	Yeah.
	How about getting into the heads of teenage boys?
	Because honestly, those are the ones shooting up schools.
	Like you can take it to the bank when you hear about a school shooting that it's going to be an 18, 19 year old young man who's been isolated, who's been buying guns, who's been obsessed with shootings, who's probably been bullied or teased in his past, who's got an absentee family situation.
Jersey Girl Profiled 00:02:23
	I mean, there is a profile and there's got to be some room for law enforcement paying attention to that, not preemptively depriving one of one's rights, but at least seeing if there's a basis for getting mental health professionals, school professionals, or potentially law enforcement alerted and somehow involved.
	We've got to put everything on the table.
	All right, Kellyanne Conway is here to talk about her book.
	And we appreciate her talking about the news with us as well.
	But the book is absolutely fascinating and very raw.
	She's very vulnerable on everything on her marriage and the whole situation with George and his tweets and her daughter and what it was like to work for President Trump and some of the tummel inside the White House.
	We're going to get into all of it.
	So don't go away.
	I knew you a long time on Fox News before you ever managed Trump's campaign.
	I did not realize you were a Jersey girl.
	I'm a Jersey girl, South Jersey.
	I was born in Camden, New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia, Megan.
	And then I was raised in a very unconventional household of my mom, her mom, and two of my mother's unmarried sisters.
	I call them the South Jersey's version of the Golden Girls.
	These four Italian Catholic women raising me in the house and, you know, house coats and everything.
	And they taught me to be a conservative, Megan, without ever having a single political conversation that I can recall.
	It was just about a small, they were all small business owners, emphasis on small faith, family, freedom, the veterans and military in our household.
	And I start the whole book out by saying by every imaginable metric, I should have been a Democrat, a liberal, a feminist, probably a man-hater too.
	My father left when I was three, no child support, no alimony.
	I met him when I was 12.
	We had a loving, full, present relationship.
	He was an awesome pop-up to my four kids before he passed away a few years ago.
	And it's a great, really story for all of us about redemption and mercy and forgiveness.
	We seek it and we ought to give it when we have that opportunity.
	It's really a story of second chances, but Jersey girl on the blueberry farm.
	And now, you know, and then George and I decided because he was a lawyer in New York that we would raise our children in North Jersey, right outside the city until we moved to Washington.
	So yes, I have that, I have that Jersey spirit.
	That explains so much about you, about the way that you are willing to spar with people verbally.
	And, you know, Jersey, Jersey girls, Jersey people in general, they're nice, but don't fight with them because they're in it for the long haul.
	Like they're not, they're not afraid, which I kind of love.
Ballot Rumors Explained 00:10:03
	All right.
	Now, I had to ask you because one of my team in researching you found this article in the Daily Mail that says they pulled up your high school yearbook and said your ambitions included kissing Rick Springfield at least once.
	Isn't that embarrassing?
	I hope he's watching.
	I guess the offer holds, but it's sort of embarrassing what you add at the last minute.
	I thought, could anybody save me from myself that this is going to live forever?
	But I have to say, I have had many accomplishments and blessings in my life, but kissing Rick Springfield is not among them.
	And now we have all these young people Googling who that is, Megan.
	But anyway, we can make this happen.
	I don't know.
	I interviewed him a long time ago.
	He's doing some DJ work on SiriXM.
	I'm hopeful, Kellyanne.
	I feel like something could happen.
	Just put a pin in that and we'll circle back.
	This should not be a life goal that goes unfulfilled.
	So when I knew you before the whole Trump stuff, you were Kellyanne Poles and you were very much involved in politics.
	Then, and originally you backed Ted Cruz, like a lot of conservatives, a lot of people were drawn to Ted Cruz because he's a conservative guy, not Trump.
	A lot of people didn't take him seriously in 2016 before that when he was running 15.
	But you, you wound up switching to Trump and you really wound up.
	I think you are the only female campaign manager to actually run a winning presidential campaign.
	Is that correct?
	That is absolutely correct.
	And it's Donald Trump who put me there.
	He was different and he wanted something different.
	And Megan, here's the deal about the story.
	I was plucked out of the plain sight wilderness when I was 49, not 29 or even 39.
	I was 49 years old.
	Inauguration day for Donald Trump was my 50th birthday exactly that day.
	And so I think the lesson there is you ply your trade, you hone your craft, you just work hard.
	You do the work your entire career.
	I was a fully recovered attorney, 12-step program and everything.
	I know you know how that is.
	And I had gone back into polling, which I had done for $8 an hour the summer between my junior and senior year, went back to that profession, worked for Frank Luntz, worked for Dick Worthland, who was Ronald Reagan's pollster, and then went out on my own.
	But you know, by the time President Trump, Mr. Trump asked me to manage the campaign, I had built up to that moment.
	But I still had such self-doubt.
	And I think what really helped me is that I was sort of an outsider too.
	The old boys network and really the new boys network in the Republican consultancy itself, a walking Rico violation and gravy train that they always help each other on.
	They had excluded me from the big boys table many times.
	And I had done very well for myself.
	I also had sort of a mini TV punitory career.
	But I think the boys excluding me from the Republican consultancy table also helped me to get nonprofit clients, corporate clients, work on issues campaign.
	I was working on policy.
	They were doing politics, politics, politics.
	And if you only ask actual active voters what they think and how they feel, you are not talking to the other 30%, 40% in primaries, maybe 50% of the country.
	So the gift of my professional career, Megan, is I have worked in all 50 states and the territories, literally gone there and talked to the voters, talked to the consumers, talked to the decision makers.
	And I had also bought a company called Woman Trend at the end of 2001.
	And I made it a division of the polling company.
	And that was the division where we did an awful lot of work that tried to suss out the trends that were being affected by women and the trends that were affecting women.
	And my job was really to tell whether it was political America, consumer America, how to get from, I would say, mass exposure to mass consumption to mainstreaming, meaning a great example was soy.
	At the time, soy was just coming onto the market.
	You saw it, but people didn't actively seek it out unless they had a dietary restriction.
	Now it's much more mainstream.
	But the question is, even though 50%, even though 90% of the country probably has exposure to it, do you yet have 50% plus one buying the product and buying it again and consuming it, not just knowing it?
	The same applies to politics.
	How do we get you, the voter, to pay attention, to think that you can trust the veracity of this particular candidate or this issue set?
	And it was just the gift of my career to have done that.
	And I was also, Megan, as I'm sure you were, a sort of semi-quasi student of Hillary Clinton.
	I had been around a long time.
	I remember Bill Clinton standing up in September of 1993, eight months on the job and saying, this is a health security card, everybody, in a primetime address.
	You're all going to get one.
	I'm going to make sure.
	And Hillary's in charge of what became known as Hillary care.
	So I had been a student of Hillary Clinton and I felt and told Mr. Trump the day he made me campaign manager that some of the attributes that naturally apply to female candidates don't apply to her.
	Female candidates are often seen as fresh and new, fresh face, new blood.
	We've never had a female congressman.
	We've never had a senator.
	We've certainly never had a president.
	So that person, people originally, they automatically say, you know what?
	I think there's this sclerotic, almost corrupt situation.
	I think we need fresh blood, new face.
	Number two, and relatedly, women are seen sometimes as beyond reproach and less corruptible.
	They just are.
	You've never heard the phrase, the old girls network, because there isn't one.
	Number three, women are seen as peacemakers, natural consensus builders, genuinely interested in what the other side thinks and how to come to yes, how to get to yes and solve.
	That is not meant to be an overgeneralization.
	I'm telling you what the data and the qualitative research has shown over the decades that the advantages some female candidates will have over male candidates.
	None of those applied to Hillary Clinton.
	Fresh face, new blood, beyond reproach, not corruptible.
	And the third one, you know, peacemaker, consensus builder, that isn't even the way she ran.
	That was not who she was.
	But I think with Hillary Clinton, when she both ran against Barack Obama in 2008 and lost, ran against Donald Trump in the general election in 2016 and lost.
	I think it was the tale of the same Hillary, which was she was trying to, she's trying really hard to say, I'm an experienced woman.
	I can do what the guys do.
	I can talk about war and economy, not just abortion or education or healthcare.
	I could do it all.
	And she missed, she missed that people also want you to be compassionate, to be empathetic.
	Well, remember, she had that moment after New Hampshire when she almost cried and it was like, oh, there might be a human in there.
	And then I don't know if you saw more recently that she, she had a weird situation where she went on camera and she read what was going to be her victory speech.
	She cried, yes.
	And got and cried there.
	It was like, oh, it's too late for that.
	I need to be in the bathroom with her.
	I don't need to be invited to a wine night in chapel.
	I'm good without it.
	But, you know, again, this is a good idea.
	But this leads to an interesting interesting area because hearing you talk about how you studied the Clintons and your experience on like what women like and what resonates with them and what doesn't brings me to the moment in your book after the Access Hollywood tape came out with Trump and Billy Bush.
	And he asked you, do you think I should drop out?
	That's what you say in the book.
	And you said you can't.
	You know, you're already on the ballot.
	It's like too late.
	This is right before the election.
	He says, can we still win?
	This is according to the book.
	And you say maybe.
	And you go on in the book to raise a really good point that wound up, I think, being the settled narrative on Access Hollywood, which was you say these things in this tape.
	Her husband did them.
	He did all this stuff.
	And we know it.
	And he was president for eight years.
	And to me, Kellyanne, that seems to be the wind that was sort of behind Trump's back when he went into that debate.
	Remember, where they brought the Bill Clinton accusers were there.
	And it sort of did shift the narrative.
	And I remember thinking, okay, we need better choices here because nobody wants more of Bill Clinton.
	Absolutely no one.
	Right.
	And even when you talk about Bill Clinton, Megan, I mean, it's very clear as I write in the book that Hillary Clinton, she was too much Hillary and not enough Clinton.
	There wasn't the charm and the connectedness and somebody who looked like she enjoyed meeting people.
	It was all very contrived.
	And yes, she called, she referred to the Trump voters in one of the worst days of her campaign as quote, deplorable and irredeemable.
	But it also just wasn't clear that she particularly liked being around people.
	Where is the evidence exactly?
	And so she didn't have her husband's gift for that.
	But I think more to the point, let me just clarify a few things because the screaming headlines from the mainstream media have had that Donald Trump wanted to quit.
	I never used the word quit.
	He didn't use the word quit.
	We were talking about the paragraph that precedes what you just read was us talking about the fact that members of the Republican Party, donors, senators, people at the RNC who had sway over such things had unendorsed him.
	These elected officials were unendorsing him that day, calling for him to step aside and then speculating to the press who was all too hungry to run with it, that they could rip him off the ballot.
	They can push him off the ballot.
	They could basically erase his nomination.
	And I told him that's not true.
	They can't do that.
	The ballots are already printed.
	Because what you say in the book is Trump asked you, quote, should I get out of the race?
	Meaning before they do that, you know, before that, we're talking about how, if you look at the paragraph or paragraphs before that, we're talking about how the rumors were that they were going to force him off the ballot.
	And so I think there was there was some attractiveness in trying to get ahead of that.
	And so, and the answer was they can't do that.
	They can't.
	And I know there, look, there were people actively trying to have a Mike Pence Paul Ryan ticket and get president to get Mr. Trump off the ticket.
	Look at all the people who unendorsed him, continued to criticize him all the way into his victory.
	And then he wins and they're freaking out.
	They're like, well, gosh, I didn't give a penny.
George Conway Tweets 00:15:36
	I said all these terrible things about him.
	How do I get back in?
	But no, you know, he's not a quitter.
	And he's also, but he also doesn't like to lose.
	And I think what he did is recognize that people, the fact that people will debate and talk about what affects them, excuse me, what, excuse me, what offends them, but they vote according to what affects them.
	And I think in 2020, there was a little bit of that with COVID, that people were affected by that.
	And we had all these crazy ways of how you can vote that were different, more people voting in more ways over more time than ever before.
	But folks also had that very much on their mind.
	And that was affecting them, not just defending them when it came to COVID.
	So it was a very different situation.
	Your experience with him as a top female in the White House was very interesting to me when I read the book because of course, as everybody knows, I asked Trump a very tough question about his language with respect to women and some of the treatment of women.
	And he didn't much like the question, but he handled it just fine.
	And then the sort of narrative was out there and ran in part because of how he responded to that question after the fact.
	But your experience with him is one-on-one and it's extended.
	And what I glean from the book is it was nothing but positive and actually quite protective of you.
	And he stood up for you many times when that sort of boys network that, you know, was kind of popping up in corners here and there and the other places.
	He stood up for you.
	And like for the one time, oh, I don't know, what was the situation where Sean Spicer went out there and said you'd been counseled?
	And Trump called him in there and said, how dare you?
	You don't, don't you say that about her?
	You don't counsel her.
	We don't talk like that here.
	He said that to the assistant White House counsel who had never met the president.
	And I said, oh, I'm so sorry you had to go through that.
	And he said, I said, but what were you thinking?
	He said, well, I had never met him before.
	So this was kind of fun.
	But no, he was protective.
	And he also, and the president was very protective with me through the very dark days of my family situation as well.
	And I do write in the book that there were two men in my life, my husband and my boss, Megan.
	I don't equate the two.
	One is a job.
	One is my marriage.
	So I don't equate the two.
	You know, your marriage vows are supposed to have no term limit.
	They're not a job.
	It's your life.
	And, but there were many, many days, Megan, if not months, where Donald Trump was very protective of me, knowing that it was incredibly difficult for my children and me to endure all of that.
	And I felt it was almost a safe place to be, honestly, to put my head down and do my work.
	And I appreciate that.
	I appreciate First Lady Milani Trump checking in regularly.
	I appreciate the president not talking about how it all was affecting him because, you know, he loves his own Twitter feed.
	He's going to go pay attention to George Conway's Twitter feed.
	He's a president of the United States.
	He's got a lot going on.
	He's worried about Putin and Kim Jong-un.
	He's not worried about George Conway's tweets.
	And he rarely mentioned George in his tweets to me.
	Other people were always mentioning George Conway's tweets to him.
	They do to this moment.
	They print out stuff.
	They fill his head with what he would refer to as fake news headlines or tweets to try to get them all riled up.
	But I appreciated the fact that he was a very good boss to me.
	I know that is not the case for all women in the workplace.
	He was a great boss.
	And I write in the book, Megan, something you'll appreciate as a mom of school-aged children.
	The fact, the facts are that at one point, an extended point over several years in the White House, working in the Trump White House were Mercedes Schlapp, Brooke Rollins, Ivanka Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and me, I looked up one day and noticed the five of us in a meeting, all with the highest rank you can have in the West Wing in the White House, assistant to the president, in this meeting at 8.20 a.m.
	We have 19 children between the five of us, ages two to 16 at the time, 12 daughters and seven sons.
	Go show me what company, what workplace the five of us would have had the highest rank along with the men in the place, able to be there at 8.20 in the morning.
	It means kids were off to school, daycare, dogs had been fed and walked.
	We were all there dressed and ready to go with our head in the game in a very serious meeting.
	And that's the Donald Trump White House.
	People can brag all they want.
	Oh, we're 100% female.
	We're feminist.
	We have a family-friendly company.
	Just read our corporate handbook, pages 562 to 572.
	We'll tell you all about it.
	I don't want to read it in a corporate handbook, Megan.
	It's meaningless.
	I want to see it in practice.
	And I could not have had that job if it were a different kind of president with a different kind of philosophy for working moms.
	Last point on that.
	I don't recall ever going to the president until it was time to leave and invoking my children to him.
	In other words, I can't do X.
	I can't go to Y because I am because I, because of my kids.
	It was never that.
	Never asked for special treatment or special favors.
	It was just implicit that if we needed to run to the school or come in a little later leave a little early, we can do that and still be up there with the men.
	I don't think the men understand it, to be honest with you.
	You know, I joke in the book that the old, the new boys network that I dealt with in the Republican consultancy, Megan, kind of followed me into the White House too, where their biggest decisions in the morning are, should I go to the Hey Adams or the Four Seasons for Breakfast?
	You know, and I'm making breakfast for four kids and looking, mom, where's my shoe?
	No, honey, had two feet yesterday.
	I'm sure they're here somewhere.
	And the big decision for some of the men I worked with, whose families, by and large, weren't there with them.
	Some of them left their families and their spouses somewhere else to help raise the kid.
	But when you're the mom, the kids have to be with you, of course.
	And their big decision is, do I work on legs or arms?
	Do I do, you know, hot yoga today or do I run?
	That's all fine.
	I wouldn't give it up for the world.
	But you know, as a working mom that our job is never done.
	You know, your kids are probably FaceTiming you now that the school nurse is calling you.
	You forgot it to make, you forgot to send the text that you did last night at two in the morning to a teacher.
	I mean, this is our job.
	It's the best job in the world.
	But I don't think I could have done it in a lot.
	I know I couldn't have done it in a lot of workplaces the way I did it in Donald Trump's White House.
	How, how old were your kids when you entered the White House?
	They had just turned seven.
	They were seven, eight, 12, and 12.
	And as I said famously at the time, people were so interested.
	Why isn't Kellyanne going to the White House?
	And I was very honest about it.
	I said, oh, I can tell you, number one, I'm staring at a gold mine of life-changing money.
	And I'm staring at it and I'm running toward it.
	I'm inching toward it.
	It was very frank about that.
	And secondly, most importantly, the decision, the vista through which I make all decisions, the lens through which I make all decisions, Megan, was I said at the time, quote, my kids are four crappy ages for mom to be in the White House.
	And I remember Steve Bannon saying, just come early, do the morning shows and leave at three.
	And I said, what am I?
	A banker?
	I mean, leave at three.
	can I do that?
	And so, but I worked it out because I felt that I would be supported there.
	And we also lived super close to the White House, which made a big difference.
	You know, if you're just going to sit in traffic or you can't get to this kid's school in enough time, if I had to walk to work, I could.
	Secret Service didn't appreciate that, but if I had to walk to work, I could.
	If I had to get home quickly, I could.
	Megan, that makes a big difference.
	Look, my situation may seem unique.
	I may be one of the most high-profile women of the 3 million who were pushed out of the workforce because of the second school year starting online in the fall of 2020, which is why I left the White House.
	Right.
	That's interesting.
	But you know what?
	That's millions of women.
	But for me, I can't complain at all because, like women all over this country, Megan, you just figure it out.
	Your family, your children comes first.
	I didn't always do it perfectly.
	I wasn't there for every single thing I wanted to be there for.
	But I also, and I think this is a lesson to young professionals also.
	I also learned to say no.
	When I was younger, I was afraid to say no.
	And I tell young people, especially women, learn to accept the word no more than you say it.
	You will be rejected.
	You will be excluded.
	You will be passed over.
	You won't get that seat in that college or grad school or that job or promotion you really wanted, worked hard for, and believed you deserved.
	It's okay.
	Dust yourself off.
	You're resilient.
	You learn from all that.
	But as I get older, it's a gift, Megan, for people of our age and stage, if I may, to learn to say no.
	And the one thing I said no to from the beginning, which everybody else in the White House wanted to say yes to, was the foreign trips.
	They're amazing to go with the president of the United States to foreign countries on these foreign trips.
	I mean, there's nothing like them.
	But I had said no to that from the beginning because you're away for five, seven, nine days at a time.
	And I thought that would be a good time to get work done in the White House or on Capitol Hill, whatever we were working on, and also be home with the kids every night.
	So it's all about choices and priorities for each of us.
	That's one of the hardest things is when you have to travel, extended travel for work and leave your kids at home.
	It's like, especially because I know you, like, like I am, are on the older side of motherhood.
	And there's not like, I don't have my mom or Doug's mom here that could swoop in and watch the kids.
	And you know, they're with like a really trusted family member who absolutely adores them.
	No offense to the nanny, but it's like, it's just not the same.
	You know, so it's, I rarely accept long oversea trips.
	I mean, the only ones I've really done in the past few years are Putin, which was worth it.
	But it has to be kind of that level to get you to leave your kids.
	So, well, let's, we have plenty of time left, but let's start on George because when I listen to you talk about it, I think about when I get pulled and be pulled between work and home, it's really between work and my kids.
	Like when you have four kids, I've got three around the same ages, they have to come first.
	They're, you know, they're dependents.
	And so the spouse sometimes moves to third place because you got to do your job and you got to take care of your kids and the spouse can move down in the rankings for the time being.
	And I wonder whether you think, you know, because I've read the book and I know all the writings about George and how betrayed you felt by the number of tweets and so on.
	Not to put the blame on you, let me make that clear, but like, do you think he felt abandoned?
	You know, do you think that's what led to him and his relationship with Twitter and what you clearly felt was a betrayal of the marriage?
	I'm just a wife who knows George Conway better than anyone.
	And I'm not a psychoanalyst.
	I'm not a psychiatrist.
	I don't appreciate when people like George pretend they are and do some armchair analysis of a president state of mind.
	Although if he wanted to do that for President Trump, I really wish he would dust off the DSM-5 right now and go analyze the guy in the White House.
	But I don't know if the word abandonment, I mean, relationships need tending, obviously, and they involve two people.
	And I remember my cousin Renee asking me about somebody years ago and saying there had been a falling out in family members.
	A friend of mine had nothing to do with our particular family.
	And she said, well, whose fault was it?
	And I said, you know, Renee, I think after 11 years, it's everybody's fault.
	In other words, it's how can you just blame one person or the other?
	So sure, that probably is true here.
	Although, Megan, I don't think a couple of things should be lost here.
	And I write about them very explicitly and in a very raw fashion.
	Very quickly.
	Number one, George and I made the decision as a couple and as a family to move to Washington, D.C. and for both of us to take jobs in President Trump's administration.
	President Trump offered George a big job, the head of the civil division at the Department of Justice.
	George accepted that job.
	He started interviewing staff.
	He was all ready to go.
	So we bought a house.
	I moved the kids to school.
	I would never do that if my spouse, if my husband and their father didn't agree to that.
	So that's number one.
	Number two, make no mistake.
	George's loyalty, if not fealty, his vows are not to Donald Trump.
	They're not to any president, any individual except me.
	I'm his wife.
	I'm the one who stood on the altar at the Basilica Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul on April 28th, 2001, in front of hundreds of loved ones and God with five priests on the altar and made those vows.
	So he doesn't need to be, quote, loyal to Donald Trump or the Republican Party or you name it.
	It's about love, honor, and cherish your spouse and the career choices she is making, which, you know, not so long before that, George was not just applauding my career choices.
	He was insisting upon them.
	I write in the book, Megan, that people say without Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump would not have been elected president in 2016.
	That's debatable.
	But what will never be in doubt is that without George T. Conway III, I could not have taken my shot with all due respect to Hamilton or Eminem.
	I could not have taken my shot without George insisting I do, giving me that courage, that backbone, and offering to help more at home and with the kids that allowed me to be the campaign manager at that level.
	So that all fell apart.
	Let me pause it there.
	Let me pause it there because I've got to squeeze in a quick break.
	But I love that you set it up that way because I think a lot of us understand, especially women with big jobs, it's hard to make it work, especially when you have a family if you don't have a supportive husband.
	I mean, it's just very, very hard.
	And you did.
	You did for the vast majority of your relationship.
	And then things took a turn.
	There's a scene in the book in which Kellyanne is told that George has just sent out a negative tweet about the president.
	And her response is, that's not possible.
	George doesn't tweet.
	Yet there it was.
	Okay, we'll get to that right after this quick break with Kellyanne Conway staying with us.
	So glad to have her here today.
	So much more to get into.
	Don't go away.
	So Kellyanne, I mentioned before the break, that's not possible.
	George doesn't tweet, yet there it was.
	Totally out of character, you write.
	Why wouldn't he give me a heads up?
	While the tweet itself was fairly mundane, the duplicity of it stung me.
	Your children did not approve.
	Claudia and Georgie, they were finishing up sixth grade, did not think that was cool of dad.
	And then you write, for the first time since George and I had gotten serious, I was looking at the possibility that the man who had always had my back might one day stab me in it.
	Oh, must have been awful.
	It's really sad, but it's also very confusing.
	And George then deleted that tweet in a bunch of other tweets and didn't tweet for a while.
	I go through that in the book.
	It's difficult to remember every move and occurrence at the time.
	So I tried to go back, Megan, and just hook together the facts of when these tweets were coming out.
	But five days before that, four or five days before that tweet, George had put out a public statement, not on Twitter, that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for the Senate confirmed position at the Department of Justice, big job to head up the civil division.
	And he said very clearly in that statement, anybody can pull it up right now.
	I have it in the book, Megan.
	He just says, President Trump, thank you for nominating me.
	I think we just, Kellyanne and I just think at this time, it's hard for both of us to have these jobs.
	And then he very explicitly says, I support, I continue to support the work of your administration.
	And of course, my wonderful wife, Kellyanne, that is days before this tweet.
	And so I know the best man from his wedding talked to him, you know, you shouldn't do that.
	He deleted some tweets.
	And I think people should know that in the year of the tweet, 2016, known as the year of the tweet, George Conway sent zero tweets.
	That's why I said to Sean Spicer, that's not possible.
	George doesn't tweet.
	I really thought it was like one of those fake accounts or somebody had hacked him.
	There was no way I thought it was him.
	And then he didn't answer the phone.
	I was trying to verify whether or not it was him.
	So it was all very confusing and ultimately unsettling and a little embarrassing for me to understand why that was happening in such a public way.
	It was just not George.
	And I think, look, we all do things that are out of character.
	There's no question.
Marriage Under Scrutiny 00:13:09
	But this went on and on then for the next several years.
	And the mainstream media could not get enough of it.
	And they eventually went from covering George's tweets to having George cover everything from impeachments.
	And he did have experience in impeachments, but only because he had helped impeach William Jefferson Clinton, Bill Clinton.
	They had him on talking about how to be a campaign manager.
	Then he's meeting with somebody about, he's a rented quote from the New York Times on COVID.
	It's just they couldn't get enough of him.
	And make no mistake, he is mentioned most in the media, particularly at that time for years, as quote, Kellyanne Conway's husband.
	Now, that's very, that's fascinating to me.
	And even on the view, you had John McCain's daughter talking incessantly about Kellyanne Conway's husband.
	Get it?
	And so I think we all need to see, you know, from where we've come, how we're known, et cetera.
	I'm very happy to stand on my own.
	But folks, you know, thought that that was then a proxy to dip into my marriage and then my children, and it was not.
	And Megan, have you seen these people?
	You're talking about very thin-skinned, terrified, troubled people living in glass houses.
	Yes.
	I love that point in the book.
	First of all, the Jersey girl does not sit quietly when people attack her and she does not hold back.
	And one of the themes of the book, as I read it, was it didn't matter whether it was a media person, someone in the White House, someone in the president's family, you give as good as you get.
	And they're going to get an elbow in the face if they come for you.
	And I like that about you because not a lot of women have it, Kellyanne.
	But you, you don't seem to have a good point.
	I never go first, though.
	I never draw first blood.
	No, no, no, I know that.
	But when you, when it's drawn upon me, I'm going to get the last word.
	I'll give one example.
	There was an example you talk about in the book where Chris Wallace tries to get into your marriage.
	He's like, you're giving him a political interview and he wants to get into your marriage.
	And it's, listen, it's, I understand water cooler people talk, my God, the husband's tweeting against the wife's boss.
	This is weird.
	But like to ask you, who are not a political candidate who work for a president about your marriage, because that's, I never did that.
	I honestly, I was on the air when this stuff was happening.
	I remember thinking this is very inappropriate, not to mention what they did to Claudia.
	Totally inappropriate by any measure, your daughter.
	But I just thought that to your point, people have their own, they live in glass houses, especially news anchors.
	And so Chris Wallace comes for you asking about your marriage.
	And you said something like, oh, what are you, Oprah?
	Now, exactly.
	Although she might be too classy to ask.
	And also, you know, he prefaced it, Megan, by saying, My viewers want me to ask you.
	And it turns out his viewers did not want him to ask that because he got excoriated for the rest of the day, I'm told by people who look at social media.
	He got excoriated to the point where the next morning he texted me.
	He's like, are we okay?
	I didn't respond because I don't think he was okay in that moment.
	Look, that's just for kicks and clicks.
	And it's whether it's beta or work yesterday, Chris Wallace in the interview, other people trying to make, I mean, it's people looking for kicks and clicks.
	And we, you know, God forbid, we can't do it under any circumstance.
	But to use my marriage, and I didn't go back at Wolf Blitzer, I didn't go back at Dana Bash.
	go back at Chris Wallace about their own personal lives.
	Should I have, Megan?
	I guess I could have.
	I know a thing or two about them, but you know what?
	You got to keep it classy.
	You can't always respond in kind and put yourself in the gutter with them.
	Just can't.
	I know it's very tempting to do so, but you didn't, but you did fight.
	I mean, you didn't go low, but you did punch back in the face, which I thought was rhetorically, which I think is appropriate.
	You didn't let the people get away with it who thought your marriage was fair game when you were on to talk about the president and the White House and policies.
	And it was just low.
	It just felt skeevy to me when I saw people doing it.
	And I, again, I understand it's interesting on a water cooler level.
	That doesn't mean it raises to the level of when confronting Kelly Ann Conway about the White House and the policy, you have the nerve to ask her about something that personal.
	And the only reason I'm asking you about it now is because you wrote all about it in your book.
	But like, I wouldn't have done that.
	You know, I mean, I would never ask you about something like that unless you said you wanted to talk about it.
	So back on that subject.
	George was never asked about me.
	He was never asked about me, Megan, which is really the rich, ironic point from the news.
	Is that right?
	I'm the one with the big job in the White House who's coming on TV in my professional capacity as senior counsel to the president with something to say.
	He's going on as Kellyanne Conway's husband.
	They give him an area in expertise.
	George is a brilliant person.
	I'm sure he has plenty to say.
	But he made a deal with his friend Jake Tapper and others.
	Don't ask me about Kelly Ann.
	So it's really, I mean, it's not even bias.
	It's like a quadruple standard.
	It's like the woman in the White House who's here to talk about things in the White House is going to be asked about her husband, who's known as Kellyanne Conway's husband.
	But Kellyanne Conway's husband cannot be asked about his wife who works in the White House.
	Follow?
	Wow.
	Remember when Hillary Clinton was asked, and I thought rightfully responded about something when she was running and they were like, well, what does your husband think?
	And to her credit, she was like, what does my husband think?
	What?
	My husband's not running.
	I'm running.
	You want to know what I think?
	I'll tell you.
	And I was like, that's a good moment for her.
	But it's the same.
	It's like, why, why do they feel so comfortable asking you about George's opinions?
	These same anchors who cut a deal with him not to ask him about you felt totally comfortable asking you about him.
	And he's not even in the White House, right?
	It's like they're just trying to sow discord.
	It's juicy.
	They, like you say, they want clicks.
	And it's uncomfortable.
	It was uncomfortable for me to watch.
	It's not, it's one of the many reasons we have to hate the media.
	But back on the other subject, which is more important, and that's you, because I find this fascinating as a professional woman, like what you were dealing with, because there's a lot of pressures in your White House.
	It's not an easy job.
	And you're dealing with, you know, young children, which is not an easy job either.
	And you write about George and the love, the love that he was developing for Twitter.
	I think a lot of people have seen this happen, whether it's a spouse or a child or themselves.
	And you say you were not prepared for the cult of George Conway.
	He would be the biggest get of the Never Trump movement.
	Very true.
	But the amount that he was getting drawn into the tweets, the ferocity you write of his tweets accelerated.
	Clearly, you write he was cheating by tweeting.
	I was having a hard time competing with his new fling.
	Explain that.
	Yeah.
	And I go on to say, Megan, and why would I?
	His new fling is called Twitter and she's not even hot.
	She has no personality.
	And, you know, that's my tongue-in-cheek way of revealing what was very painful.
	I think that our disagreement is not really about Donald Trump.
	Obviously, he can have his opinion.
	I can have my opinion about Donald Trump.
	This is America.
	I think the disagreement is how we spend our time.
	And I just felt he was increasingly in spending his time on Twitter.
	He left the law firm.
	He was doing the Lincoln Project, I guess, a little bit, although the founders of the Lincoln Project now go after him and say, I hardly knew him.
	Okay.
	I think it helped them a great deal.
	The sort of washed up shop warning consultants who had never won a presidential race to speak of as campaign manager to have Kellyanne Conway's husband involved in that.
	But I felt it was, I wish George had owned it more.
	In other words, I didn't have him on Twitter notifications.
	I didn't see what he was doing.
	Plenty of people were following him and then putting it right in front of the president, thinking it would hurt me professionally and personally, wound me personally.
	Shame on them.
	But I wasn't paying attention to everything he was doing.
	I was very busy with my job.
	And of course, my first and most important job is mom.
	But why didn't he just own it?
	Why not just say to me, I've got an op-ed coming out in the Washington Post tomorrow.
	I'm polishing off my op-ed in the New York Times while you're up helping four kids with homework or doing the dishes.
	Why not just say, you're not going to believe the ad we're coming out with the Lincoln Project?
	Like, don't I deserve advanced notice and some transparency?
	Why would I find out when everybody else did?
	Or frankly, Megan, after editors at those newspapers or Lincoln Project people found out, why would I find out after the fact?
	Is that what I deserve?
	And is that what I deserve because of where I work and how I vote?
	And I have to ask that same question again and again and again when it comes to my children, again and again, when it comes to my inadvertent revelation of sexual assault, again and again about being a working.
	In other words, am I less human?
	Am I less valuable?
	Is my veracity less just because of where I work?
	And I think that's what happened.
	We imbue people with more credibility, with more competence, with more compassion, with more positive attributes depending on where they sit on Donald Trump.
	This should not be.
	We are all individuals.
	Absolutely not in your marriage.
	I mean, do you?
	Certainly not in my marriage.
	That's right.
	So look, I'm very frank about it.
	I think it was, I think George and I are two people always took our wedding vows seriously and faithfully.
	And I felt increasingly I just couldn't compete with the likes, the followers, the attention, you know, feeding the beast.
	And I mean, it's funny because I couldn't watch all this as I was in the White House, Megan.
	I wasn't paid to read about myself or to read George's tweets, but I've looked at them since and study for the book.
	And it's very shocking just to see, you know, George has sent by the time Donald Trump left office, George had sent about 80,000 tweets, 8-0.
	And I don't have the number right in front of you.
	The president's official account was something like 30,000.
	It was a fraction.
	And isn't that ironic?
	Wow.
	What was it like?
	And I know George, he's a very successful lawyer, but I know you had a house in Northern New Jersey, as you pointed out, and he could go there and he could work.
	But when you'd be at home in, you know, outside of, well, in D.C., when you were at home and you, he'd been tweeting and he'd been in the news.
	And I know at one point, MSNBC put him on as their impeachment specialist.
	I mean, it got crazy.
	The cult of George Conway is real, all as a result of you.
	I mean, you know, with all due respect to George, given his legal success, it was really his marriage to you that made people want to hear from him.
	Would you have dinner together?
	Would it be like you can cut detention with a knife?
	How did it feel inside the house?
	Well, I really tried to keep things together, definitely in our marriage, but certainly for the children, and to have, you know, sanctity within that, within the house.
	But we really couldn't talk about Donald Trump and the tweets and all because George would just become angry.
	He just, you know, everything was Trump, Trump, Trump.
	And I had just spent the entire day with Trump, Trump, Trump working.
	And now I'm going to come home with kids, kids, kids, kids, and talk about that all over again or hear about that.
	And I can't even say it was often logical or even linear or rational or calm.
	It was just, you know, you work for a bad, I write in my book, you work for a madman.
	You're ruining yourself.
	And I write in the book that I did not want to be stuck in a cable news segment in the master bedroom, that I can hear that all day long, where people who don't know Donald Trump are talking about what's in his head or why he did X or whether he's going to get arrested or impeached or indicted and all these things that we were promised.
	Megan, to be part of the cabal that owes everybody an apology over Russia collusion or falsely tweeting or saying things that are not true, like bounties being put on the heads of soldiers in Afghanistan.
	I mean, goodness, I think John Bolton said that wasn't true.
	The Biden administration came out early on and said they see no evidence of that.
	But, you know, these tweets live and the conversation goes on.
	I just think it's that there's no accountability if you're part of the mob.
	And look, I think it's also very unusual.
	Well, it is very unusual, but it must have been very difficult for some people to realize that we have a husband who's known first and best because of his conservative wife who works for Donald Trump.
	And think about that for a moment.
	Hillary Clinton went on to be senator, secretary of state.
	We know her first and most through her husband.
	That's just a fact.
	And that list that I just said, people who are daughters of or wives of or were girlfriends of, that's a very long list.
	Let's not name names, but let's know in our heads.
	My path in this situation was completely unique.
	It's very rare that the husband's known for the woman, especially when it comes to conservative politics.
	So, and you know, also, I think people out there thought this would create division between Donald Trump and me, or maybe create division between my children and me.
	And that didn't happen.
	And shame on them for thinking that they were in charge of creating division between the president and his senior counselor.
	Don't Trump was pretty restrained.
	He hasn't sent out a lot of tweets.
	I sent one recently and he sent one during the, but like, I think it's only about two tweets on George Conway, which for Trump is very restrained.
	And that's obviously out of respect for you.
	But I wonder, Kellyanne, like if you, because I know, I know you're not a psychologist, but when I read the book, I thought, okay, so he either feels abandoned by Kellyanne for Trump, you know, like he feels like he lost his wife to this job and he misses her and he feels, you know, it's bringing up insecurities for him.
Entitled Political Change 00:10:31
	I know I'm doing Oprah, but this is my own personal speculation.
	Or he just did a great job.
	Or he just, you know, he hates Trump so much that he's, he's putting it on her.
	But I, and that's an easy place to go because he joined Lincoln Project and all that and all of his tweets that were so angry against Donald Trump.
	My own view of it is I'm going to put it more in category number one, just because if you look at when he started, it's like Trump hadn't even done that much.
	And all the controversy about Trump prior to running, that didn't turn him off.
	I feel like he feels like he lost you to another man and he hated that man and it spilled over onto you and he just couldn't control it.
	Forgive me, but that was my own take on it.
	It could be.
	Again, I don't want to psychoanalyze George.
	I know what our conversations have been and I know what our conversations haven't been.
	And this is it.
	George is a very, very smart person.
	And I, you know, will always be blessed to be his wife of decades.
	And these four children we have.
	George is an only child.
	I'm an only child, Megan, but these four kids have each other.
	And God willing, so will their kids and their kids' kids.
	And that will hands down be my greatest legacy, these kids.
	And so my greatest blessing, of course.
	But, you know, all that said, and there is a but, I think George is somebody who spends his time exactly as he wants to.
	And I'm not sure that that includes, you know, me that often.
	And I think that you, I tell my children, the three most important decisions you'll ever make are where you go to school, because yes, it has something to do with your career, but also your lifelong friendships.
	And maybe if you live somewhere different geographically, you end up there.
	So where you go to school, whom you marry, or if you don't marry, it's your choice.
	And what you do when no one's looking.
	In other words, how you spend your time.
	And I feel that here.
	So, but George and I are very cordial to each other.
	I mean, we share four kids.
	It's a chaotic, it's a chaotic life.
	And we have kids who go to school in different cities.
	So as their two parents, we're constantly going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
	And I credit both of us for doing that, for making it work, because it'd be very easy to be selfish as the parent and say, you're all going to school in X City.
	You're all going to do this.
	And lots of people who run around saying, I'm an independent thinker.
	I'm an open-minded mom.
	My kids can do whatever they want.
	And then they tell their kids where they have to go to school, what they have to eat, who their friends can be and not be, what they must do.
	I wanted to be the mom.
	And George is supporting this also as the dad who tells the kids, be self-designated, be independent, make your own choices.
	And in that case, you know, our two younger daughters wanted to continue in school where they started in the second and fourth grades.
	And our eighth grade is starting high school in the fall.
	So that's where they are.
	And then our two older ones really wanted to finish their academic careers where they started, which was North Jersey.
	And so we respect that and we accommodate that.
	And that requires a great deal of, I think, sacrifice for George and me.
	But my goodness, that's what parents are.
	It's never about you again.
	So I don't, I write in my book, you know, people want to focus on the George pieces that are maybe not so easy to read.
	I write very lovingly, nostalgically about George, our courtship, our marriage, what it was like to be married for several years before we even had children.
	By the way, I want the audience to know Ann Coulter set you up.
	Fun fact.
	She did.
	George asked, you know, it's very unlike George to say, do you know this Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, my maiden name, Megan, because he saw me on the cover of a magazine on the Metroliner, remember, pre-Axella?
	Wow.
	And it's very unlike him to ask.
	And we met.
	And anyway, I always say it was intrigue at first sight with George and he made an effort and we bonded over sports, et cetera.
	But NetNet, you know, you're forever bound to people with whom you have children and to whom you've been married.
	And so I really try to look at the positive part, but I also say in the book, I'll never really understand what happened.
	I'll never understand how this was worth it.
	And I say in this book, Megan, in the afterword, ladies and gentlemen, if you are at odds or estranged from a loved one, a family member or close friend, because of politics, because of Trump or Biden, or just politics or ideology, pick up the phone today.
	Do you want to be loved or do you want to be right?
	Is it really worth it?
	And you're going to have these differences.
	We all have differences that I always say, you know, opposites attract, but similars endure.
	But you know what, Megan?
	I mean that very earnestly in the book because we can't unify as a country on different things if we can't unify as families or as households or as it has to be about politics.
	I mean, it's at so many people.
	I have so many friendships with people who have very different political views than I do.
	We just don't talk about politics.
	So many other more interesting things to talk about, especially when you're married and you have kids.
	So do you think then, Kellyanne, that your time in the White House wound up costing you your marriage?
	I don't look at it that way.
	No, I think couples, only the couple knows what's really going on.
	And that is the truth here also.
	And I think relationships are very complicated.
	And so, no, I think my time in the White House was encouraged in large part by George, who wanted to take a job and wanted to leave the firm and do something totally different and did.
	I think George would have made a brilliant judge.
	I think he'd make a, you know, a great professor.
	I think if he wanted to go be a public interest lawyer somewhere, he says he's retired, but he's very skilled and he's relatively young.
	And if he wants to do that, of course, you know, he, I'll be cheering him from the sidelines, but or in the arena, as it were.
	But no, I don't think.
	And I actually think that's respectfully an unfair question that the woman would get asked.
	You know, the man's never really asked.
	I'm just saying that, like, he, what, for whatever reason, he was so hateful towards Trump.
	You know, he held it against you or whatever it was.
	You know, it's too much of an obsession.
	I mean, we already know.
	And part of this book, Megan, really is we already know what George thinks.
	He sent 100,000 tweets.
	I restrained.
	I tried to have some class, dignity, grace, and restraint in not responding to the two tweeting men in my life, particularly my husband.
	And now is my turn to talk not to do this tell all and bore most, but to really open up and be pretty vulnerable, vulnerable about it.
	And no, but I think, you know, not you certainly, but just generally, I think our society and the and the quick to judge the sexes in different ways and put us in these different boxing categories is always, we don't ask them.
	And do you think that like your golf habit or your gambling habit or your mistress or your, do you think that cost your marriage?
	You know, where it's just always, should I have not taken a job?
	Should I have not moved my kids to Washington?
	People need to know we did that as a.
	I mean, I think even if, even if the answer is yes, I think the haters do.
	They like to.
	I call them the wise.
	I think if you lose your, if, if you lost, if, if your marriage ended, and I mean, you haven't said that it's ended.
	I'm gleaning that it's either over or drastically changed because of your time in the White House, then you know, how strong was it to begin with, right?
	It's like you'd like to think that a strong foundation would have managed to find a way.
	And you ultimately walked away.
	I mean, you ultimately did walk away so you could parent your kids, you could tend to your family.
	I don't know what George did to protect the family.
	What I saw was a man who didn't seem to care much about the effect on his wife and his kids.
	He really just wanted to have his say about President Trump.
	So I'm trying to be generous to him and saying maybe he missed you.
	But I think you point out in the book, you know, I kind of felt as your friends felt that he was, that this was abusive, that it felt sneaky, almost sinister.
	Those are the words from the book.
	And I, I could relate to that.
	It felt abusive to me, what he did over and over and over.
	So I'm not trying to give him an out.
	I'm just trying to like, he's not here.
	So I'm trying to throw him a bone to try to give him a generous lens.
	Well, that is, well, thank you, as do I, but that is, that is a word that is used time and again, and including by people who cannot stand Donald Trump and would never vote for him and didn't want him to be president.
	They feel for me.
	They feel for the kids.
	They've just, quote, never seen anything like this.
	And so, and the other thing I'll just say is, let me make clear again, because I said it a half an hour ago on your show, very clear.
	George is entitled to his opinion, whether it's a political opinion, an opinion about Corgi's or sports, the other things he tweets on, apparently.
	He's entitled to change his mind about Donald Trump.
	He's entitled to change his politics.
	He's entitled to change his voting registration.
	That is never in question.
	What is very concerning, confusing, and just unfathomable for me is why a year and a half after Donald Trump's not in the White House, why we're still talking, why he's still talking about Donald Trump when he was in the White House.
	It's too much.
	It's repetitive.
	We already heard it.
	We already know it.
	And so I think it's critically important for us to focus on that piece as well.
	It's not really the substance of the disagreement.
	It's the ubiquitousness of the disagreement.
	And I did say less drama, more mama.
	I went in to tell the president I'm leaving.
	My kids need me.
	And he was very compassionate.
	He said, no, no, no, you stay.
	You go do what they need you to do, honey.
	You stay.
	We want you here.
	Don't worry about it.
	Baron's in the same situation we know.
	And I say, Mr. President, I wasn't there enough in the spring.
	I was here in the situation room sitting behind doctors Fauci and Berks trying to figure out as a non-medical professional what's going on and how can we communicate it to the public.
	I said, I can't have the second school year with mom not fully present.
	And that was my decision.
	And I'll never regret that decision.
	I'm glad to have made good on that decision.
	And you had already accomplished so much.
	I mean, it was, it was, I think that was the perfect time for you to make that move.
	You had accomplished so much.
	You didn't know the first term was, I can't remember.
	Did you know the first term was ending?
	You didn't, right?
	Because it was January 2020 that you left.
	It was August 2020 when I announced I was leaving and yes, the election was about two and a half.
	Yes, it was before.
	Yeah, so you, for all you knew, there was a second term coming and you were willingly stepping away from it to be with your family.
	And we all have to find those, you know, those ways to sort of compromise between our various responsibilities.
	All right, moving on from George.
	But before I do, can I ask you directly whether, are you still together?
	I don't answer the question about the irony for me is I don't discuss my private relationship that way.
	No, no problem whatsoever.
	Do not genuinely do not wish to probe beyond where you're coming from.
Friends Abandoned Over Tweets 00:13:36
	We are married and we have four children together.
	Those are the facts.
	Say it again.
	I'm sorry.
	We are married and we have four children together.
	Four children together.
	Okay.
	And you're finding a way to prioritize them, which is good.
	I mentioned it a moment ago.
	Look, George got swept up by the Twitter and the social media and the cult of George Conway, and the media covered it in a disgusting way.
	But what they did to Claudia, George and Kellyanne's daughter, one of her oldest, she's got twins, was absolutely disgusting and it's unforgivable.
	And she talks about it in the book.
	And we'll get into that and a bit more on life with Trump in just one second.
	There are certain lines we didn't use to cross in media.
	And one of them was bringing somebody's children into our coverage, especially in the political realm.
	And we've seen some blowback to it.
	They tried to do it to Baron Trump, and there was enough pushback that the media did back off of Baron Trump.
	But Claudia, your daughter, she's one of your oldest, a boy-girl twin set.
	She started tweeting and doing some TikToks and so on.
	And that's fine.
	That is what every teenage girl does.
	I mean, like they're all 15-year-old girls are all on TikTok sending out pictures of themselves.
	That's what they do.
	But that was not a private matter, according to Taylor Lorenz, who I really think is emerging in story after story as a villain.
	She's just a villain who doesn't care about destroying people's lives.
	And it doesn't matter how young or how private or how unwilling they are to put themselves into the public eye.
	And TikTok for a 15-year-old girl is not the same as the public eye.
	That is not the same as willingly being all over the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
	That's not.
	And any reporter worth her salt would understand that if you are going to loop that girl in to a story and write about her or out the TikToks, et cetera, the parents must be involved.
	So please tell us what actually happened with this Taylor Lorenz, who was writing for the New York Times.
	Now she's with the Washington Post and your daughter and her TikToks.
	And Taylor Lorenz is somebody who says she doesn't want people to know her name, where she lives.
	She's so upset.
	She's crying on national TV, Megan, because people are talking to this now 38-year-old woman about her predatory behavior on not just my child, but other people's children and calling this business leader a racist and on social media and showing up at this teenager's house and promising them stuff.
	So there she is, Taylor Lorenz.
	So what happened is very simple.
	My daughter was doing what teenagers do.
	She was photographing herself and her friends on TikTok and she was pushing back an authority, including mom and dad.
	She was expressing her political views, which of course I raised all four of my children, George, Claudia, Charlotte, and Vanessa, to be independent thinkers, to make their own way, to probe and to discuss and to discern and suss it all out.
	And then Taylor Lorenz thought she saw George in the back of one of the TikToks and realized who Claudia Conway was and immediately told her then 200,000 followers on Twitter, did a whole string of Claudia's anti-Trump TikToks, which because it's the New York Times, allowed basically every other media outlet to do the same.
	Very few of them just stopped Megan in that ferocious moment and said, Hold on, is this news?
	Is this right?
	Is this appropriate?
	Let me go back and see.
	Or George and Claude, George and Kellyanne mentioned in this article as having said this is okay or giving a comment.
	George Conway and Kellyanne Conway are fairly easy to reach people.
	And the fact that Lorenz and none of her editors at the New York Times did that, and the fact that when I called and emailed them from my official White House account, so it'll be in the archives one day, they were so flip, they were so insensitive and so flip.
	I said, This person should, she said, Oh, Taylor would love to talk to you and Claudia more about your family.
	My goodness.
	So, George, he got involved also.
	Well, that guy no longer has a job.
	She's now moved on.
	But, but people should know that because of where I worked, because of how I vote, people thought it was okay to do something that is not okay.
	Megan, a 15-year-old, cannot vote, cannot drive, cannot go to an R-rated movie.
	I don't think you can get the ears pierced without a parent's permission, can't do any number of things that adults can do.
	But yet, you have adults, a 35-year-old adult woman contacting Claudia and promising her what every teenager wants: fame, fortune, likes, followers, attention, interviews.
	And I have a lot of those direct messages because Claudia has shared them with me.
	And I will not forgive or forget the adults who did that.
	Tell the audience what Taylor Lorenz said about how she and she and Claudia are basically equals.
	That they're mutuals.
	That it was fine that they were talking because they're mutuals.
	They're peers.
	Hey, Chicky, you're a 35-year-old grown woman.
	I mean, she's like a Peter Pan.
	She said she loves Twitter because she can just quote.
	She posted a tweet from bed and said, I love Twitter because I can just post shit from my bed all day.
	And then did.
	She doesn't have children of her own, which would be fine, except she's picking on other people's children.
	She's a 35-year-old person who said, It's fine because Claudia and I are mutuals on social media, which means they follow each other.
	That's weird.
	We're peers.
	And then this is the kicker.
	And the New York Times editors agreed with this until they were afraid and pulled back, Megan.
	They said, you know, Taylor told Claudia if at any time Claudia felt uncomfortable, Claudia should give her parents Taylor's number.
	What?
	That's the standard now?
	By the way, Megan, are there standards?
	Are there standards in media for contacting minors?
	I have asked this question again and again.
	Somebody told me very recently at their ABC there are, somebody told me, in other words, people gave me, I've been asking around, are there standards?
	Because there need to be.
	You can't, I mean, listen, I can only speak to my own experience at Fox and NBC.
	You could never put a minor on the air without getting permission from the parent.
	You just, you can't do a story about a minor and take pictures of them and use their personal information without getting permission from the parent.
	You know, the New York Times said, well, Claudia is famous.
	She's a public figure.
	You just made her that way, you jerks.
	She wasn't before you did that.
	So you make it and then said, this is fine.
	So I got to say, I give my daughter, Claudia, a thousand, barrels of credit, Megan, because, you know, once you get that fame and fortune and attention and likes and all, it's very tough to give it up.
	And I have a message too to my former friends who have teenage girls who were Claudia's friends.
	They were, I think they were very jealous of Claudia because some of them are in marketing, could never get that many likes and attention.
	But you know what?
	It was a sick way that it happened.
	But my message is Claudia overcame all that.
	She had more, she has more class dignity, judgment, and discretion, as do her three siblings in her pinky than these adults who were coming upon her like gargoyles.
	Yes, exploiting her.
	Exploiting her.
	You write about that in the book.
	That need, the need.
	She's a teenager.
	She's a child.
	Of course.
	And her need for likes and follows and retweets and all that is very human, but especially exploitable, especially exploitable for a teenage girl, which Taylor Lorenz 100% understands and the New York Times 100% understands.
	And instead of giving two shits about her, they exploited her.
	They created a severe problem for her and her life and even within your family walls.
	And then they sat back and tried to feast on the spoils, Kellyanne.
	They enjoyed every phase of it.
	And when you and Taylor had, I'm sorry, when you and Claudia had some tumult as a result of some of this, because we saw it, she tweeted it out, whatever, they loved that too.
	They dined on that upset in your family like vultures.
	And I know who they were.
	And by the way, there are a lot of adults who still follow Claudia on Twitter.
	You're weird.
	What are you hoping she'll reveal to you?
	Exactly.
	What are you hoping she'll reveal to you, you who are old enough to be her mother, some of them grandmother?
	And that's the thing was they thought that Claudia was some kind of love trial between like Greta Thunberg and Deep Throat.
	She's my child.
	She's a child and she's my child.
	And I have to tell you, Megan, the whole story of my father leaving us with no child support, no alimony, me meeting him when I was 12 and having a full, present, loving relationship with him for 40 years until he passed away until I was 52.
	God rest his soul.
	I talk a lot about second chances and redemption and mercy and forgiveness that if you're someone who seeks it, you ought to be someone who also gives it when being asked.
	And I have to tell you on this one, I feel no mercy.
	I feel, I don't feel an ounce of forgiveness to these predatory adults who all knew better.
	I mean, look at what the late night comedians, should we be calling them comedians?
	I don't think most of them are comedists.
	Look at what they were doing.
	And then if something happens when they're children, oh, please, my child, or oh, my children, oh, my children are off limits.
	I'm sorry.
	We have to have standards.
	And you know what I like to say in the book?
	You and I know a lot of these things, not because somebody taught us or told us.
	If you've been raised by a woman and not a wolf, people, you know what's right and what's wrong.
	And it has to apply evenly.
	But I'm very proud of Claudia because she's objectively brilliant and beautiful.
	And she's got so much going on that these predatory adults, these troubled, thin-skinned, terrified nobodies living in glass houses will never have going on what Claudia Conway has going on.
	How is she doing now?
	Because you write in the book that her health was compromised by the heady events that went down.
	Yeah, it's just very jarring for, you know, first of all, I think the health of that entire generation, that entire section is really about screen time, the school time, the challenges that came from that, from the isolation, from being out of the classrooms off of campus, and then being in front of the screen for school and then being in front of the screen to see you trending.
	It was all very chaotic, very heady.
	And I really do have to thank so many friends and acquaintances, many of whom don't like Donald Trump, for stepping in.
	I have to thank Donald Trump himself and Melania Trump and so many people, so many colleagues in the White House for really just trying to give us protective cover.
	And they know you just don't do that.
	And no, she's great.
	Claudia is, she's amazing.
	She's going to have a big life, big brain, beautiful girl.
	And like her three siblings, Megan, George and Charlotte Vanessa, they are resilient.
	We already know what they're made of.
	We already know who they are and what they're made of.
	And I tell them, oh, you ought to write that in your college essays because everyone runs around.
	My kid is resilient.
	My kid is taking Mandarin.
	My kid can do this, can do that.
	That's so wonderful, everybody.
	We were tested and they came on the amazing people they are.
	Now, wait.
	You mentioned something in passing.
	Did you lose friends?
	Friends abandoned you because of the Claudia tweets?
	I think, well, what I, what happened is one of my very close friends has a daughter who's very jealous of Claudia, who always tried to be a model, who, you know, is always posting bikini pictures on TikTok for what purpose?
	I mean, is she a bikini model or does she want likes and followers?
	So I think there was a lot of tension there that people were getting what other Claudia was getting when other people wanted.
	Who would want what happened to her?
	Actually, and then another very close friend who Claudia considered a second mom, slapped her across the face and called me and said, I did that for you.
	You did it for me.
	You slapped my child.
	She's just, she's out of control.
	She's, that is not what you do.
	You, you show compassion.
	You, you envelope somebody in love and understanding.
	And Megan, whatever the reaction is, you just start out with what you and I and everybody watching this knows or should know, ladies and gentlemen, which is these are children.
	You can count the number of days they've been alive.
	You remember your life before they were here.
	They rely upon us.
	I had done a research project I talk about in the book, Megan, years ago, right before I had children, right before Georgia and Claudia were born.
	I did a research project between 9-11 and when they were born in the fall of 2004.
	And it always stuck with me, these women who were leaving the workforce, not necessarily when their kids were babies, but when they were teens and tween, recognizing that those are the tough years that you need someone there when they get home.
	They get off the bus or you pick them up from school.
	They've been bullied.
	They're going through puberty.
	They feel less than.
	They're not invited to the sleepover.
	I mean, I'm 55 years old.
	If I wasn't invited to something on a Saturday night, I had no idea.
	I had a perfectly nice Saturday.
	Oh my God.
	I'd be like, thank God.
	I always say I don't have FOMO.
	I have Jomo.
	I have joy of missing out.
	It's fine.
	Don't invite me.
	But you see what I'm saying?
	Yes.
	Yes, there are some friendships that are beyond repair.
	And then I also, and that's okay.
	I mean, listen, that's okay.
	I found out who people really are.
	They could be phony hypocrites all they want.
	Things shake out the way they should.
	What I care about is my relationship with my daughter.
	And I do go after the people who tried to cause dissension and disruption and legal disruption in my household and shame on them.
	I think that, you know, again, these people, I feel this is my problem with the cultural cleavage we have right now that I write about, Megan, the difference between people who live their lives mostly online, which is a lot of people in this country, sadly, and people like me who want to live their life mostly offline, where I don't know, it looks, tastes, smells, and is better.
	But I think people online believe, believe this parallel universe in which they live.
	And you had 25 plus years of life without that.
Relationship With Daughter 00:09:01
	Same as without it.
	So I think that's helpful.
	You know, I mean, this generation, they've never had it.
	And it's one of the sad things about the adults too, the adults who just believe other strangers' comments and act on them.
	And they are, they're, I just, I hope they get some fresh air, a hobby, and some love.
	Yeah, but maybe an elbow in the face if they continue their bad behavior.
	Let me ask you about Jared Kushner.
	You don't seem to be a fan.
	He wasn't very kind to you, according to the book, while you were in the White House.
	You write, he didn't have the guts to bring it up to me himself, but Ivanka told me her husband resented all the credit I got for the 2016 election win while he had been, quote, written out of it.
	Then you write, he must have forgotten about the time he posted on posed on the cover of Forbes magazine as the guy who won the election, his regular communications with Rupert Murdoch and Matt Drudge to help shape coverage, including of him, or when he summoned acolyte Brad Parscal onto 60 Minutes to claim how brilliant the two of them were in securing Trump's victory in 2016.
	Or the, well, you get the point.
	Thoughts on Jared Kushner.
	Well, look, you said I wasn't a fan of his.
	I wasn't a fan of the way he treated me and excluded me from policy meetings the president wanted me to be in or pieces of the portfolio that had been assigned to me or shared with him.
	I think when you have all that authority and not much accountability, that golf G-U-L-F is dangerous.
	And Jared Kushner is a very smart person.
	He's very shrewd.
	He's very smart.
	He had great business experience when he came to the White House, but it wasn't Washington experience.
	And Megan, I write in the book, I write in the book, here's the deal.
	Pick up your copy.
	Good father, give good beach read.
	Megan, I write in here is the deal that it was very charming, if not determinative, that Donald Trump had no Washington experience.
	That's what America wanted in their next president.
	But it wasn't as charming when people in his inner circle didn't have any experience and weren't really willing to learn it, to do the work.
	Looking back, I think we all should have gotten to Washington sooner to be part of the active transition in Washington, D.C. and not up in Trump Tower in New York.
	We're just so busy there.
	But, you know, I'm somebody who knows what she doesn't know.
	And I think Jared is always trying to throw logs in my way, excluding me purposely from things, including the 2020 campaign, putting his own Brad Parscal there, who Jared and the president eventually fired, but not until about July of 2020.
	So very late in the game.
	He had been the campaign manager for two and a half years.
	He had $1.4 billion.
	And I was very frank with the president.
	I said, you know, why does he get to pick and choose his legacy?
	You don't.
	People just are picking your legacy for you.
	That's not fair.
	He screwed up politics in the Midwest and then high tailed it to bring peace to the Mideast.
	And again, I think some of the accomplishments that he was involved in are notable, are consequential.
	But we had a Secretary of State.
	We had a vice president.
	We had a president.
	Why is it always the women who are willing to share their credit?
	I was given credit immediately.
	Oh, without you, Donald Trump wouldn't have gone.
	You turned that campaign around.
	We all watched it.
	You were on TV seven, eight days, seven, eight times a day telling us we're going to Wisconsin and Michigan for this, like walking us through the strategy.
	And I'm always immediately sharing the credit.
	I was part of a small, but smart, nimble team who got it done.
	I would name everybody else.
	And yet, you know, they're trying to take credit.
	And I just think it's regrettable.
	I think many women understand what I'm talking about.
	Men in the workplace, you know, whether it's subtle or overt, just trying to diminish or sideline or denigrate you.
	They also tried to say I was a leaker.
	I mean, good God, Megan, did you see me out there with the press in a non-pressing communication shop on the gravel for 25 minutes taking their questions?
	Do you think I then went inside and was in the middle of the day?
	I think you made a great point in the book.
	I agree with the points in the book about how to spot a leaker.
	They're very good.
	People should buy the book.
	I won't reveal them here, but you're dead on, especially point number one.
	And I'm just going to leave it as a tease so the audience has a reason to go read.
	I have to ask you about Trump, of course, and his electoral prospects, Kellyanne, because there's so many people speculating.
	And Trump, you know, he kind of, I guess there are reasons, all sorts of like fundraising and other reasons why he can't really say, yes, I'm running.
	But if he runs again, you know, you're at a different place in your life.
	Got a few years under your belt now since you left.
	Would you serve again if he wins?
	And well, if he runs and then if he wins.
	Well, I want Joe Biden and Kamala Harris out of their ASAP because let's start with that.
	I think in less time than it takes to have a baby, Megan, they unraveled so many of the best policies and mostly based on spite, some on ideology, but mostly just based on the competence and spite, a lot of those negative attributes about which the public sees now, because you look at the polls and it's irrefutable.
	So I want to be there for my best and highest use.
	If President Trump would like me to work with him, then we can.
	I think people are looking for vintage Trump.
	They loved the 2015, 2016 build the wall, repeal, replace Obamacare, cut your taxes, repeal Common Core.
	Like those three, three easy to remember, three word policy prescriptions that then had a lot of substance behind them.
	And not a rehash of the 2020 election.
	And he has such a joy in the job.
	He and I are not going to really see eye to eye on that, I suppose.
	And I know he's got a lot of people in his head at all time saying today's the day Pennsylvania is going to decertify.
	Today's the day Wisconsin will change his votes.
	Today's the day, Georgia.
	I've just always been very frank and upfront with him.
	heartbroken that he's not in the Oval Office.
	I wanted him to win a second term.
	I wish he were the president right now.
	And I just think there are a lot of people feeding his brain at all times, things that they were not able to deliver upon.
	And if you have that evidence, if this is what happened, put it forward, get it going.
	But after that, I think people want to get back to the great Trump economy, the energy independence, the national security, Putin not in Ukraine, Iran not salivating as a nuclear capable threat to Israel, manufacturing, mining, you know, people who work with their hands being respected and resourced and having opportunities.
	The list goes on and on, as you know.
	Joe Biden's going to shut down the virus.
	We're still dealing with it.
	We gave him three vaccines ready to go on the arm, and he's dealing with three or more variants.
	We don't, so much has gone awry.
	And I think if there's a rematch, President Trump is best equipped to say this is a rematch.
	The guy who got this done and the guy who unraveled, you decide.
	You know, there's a big debate within the Republican Party about whether Trump's the best man for the job.
	Is he too divisive?
	Are there, you know, has he overcome some of the issues that cost him the election the last time?
	Mike Pence making noise about possibly running against President Trump.
	Trump said this week on, I think it was Stuart Varney.
	He's not worried about Pence.
	I think he meant he's not worried about losing to Pence.
	So what do you make?
	I mean, do you understand?
	Do you see the argument it's time for a new standard bearer, somebody with perhaps less baggage?
	Well, there are people who have lots of, there are many standard bearers of the America First agenda.
	They're all running on that, aren't they?
	I mean, some of them think they're going to run as the never Trump candidate, post-Trump candidate.
	Right now, that lane looks like a bike path and it's pretty crowded.
	It's not yet a lane.
	Don't know that it would be.
	But I think first and foremost, if President Trump himself, the leader of the America First movement, the man who helped make, well, who got all these accomplishments done, Megan, he'll go first and he'll say whether or not he's running.
	And then we'll see what others do.
	If he doesn't run, I believe the person who needs to appeal to those 74 million voters and the person, Trump voters, and the person who needs to pick up the America First mantle, that will be somebody who's hewing very closely to those policies.
	Obviously, Vice President Pence is out there, Secretary of State Pompeo.
	There are others who are out there continuing to talk about the great policy accomplishments of the Trump-Pence-Pompeo administration.
	They're certainly in demand for speeches, for appearances, for congressional endorsements and fundraising.
	And I think I contrast that to what's going on in the Democratic Party, where you have sitting congressmen and Senate candidates who don't want President Joe Biden to have their number to campaign with them.
	So it's really fascinating to see.
	I think it's going to be a fantastic fall for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
	But I got to ask you.
	As somebody who's a pollster and who ran a successful campaign, give us like the odds.
	What are the odds Trump is going to won?
	What do you think?
	Gonna run?
	Oh, I think the odds are better than not that he runs because he wants to run.
	And I think that he'd like to announce it sooner rather than later because that's Donald Trump.
	He's out there being asked to be a kingmaker and was the king.
	So I think it's very simple to understand that.
	And look, Donald Trump, give him his due.
	He did this already.
	He's one for one when he ran the first time.
	The first time he ran, he won.
	Number two, he sees what's going on in this country.
	He's part of the majority of vast majority of Americans, Megan, who is distraught and upset with the policies, the disaster, the man-made disaster that is the Biden-Harris White House sheet.
	If you have an opportunity to help confront that and turn it around, it's tough to sit on the sidelines.
	So I think it's better than much better than 50-50 that he does do it today, May 26, 2022.
Trump Runs Again 00:01:16
	Wow.
	All right.
	Well, I'll say this.
	I read this book and what I saw was that Jersey girl throughout, a strong person who confronts people in the moment who are treating her poorly, who doesn't wait until later to be a backstabber.
	You know, she'll punch you in the face, not stick the knife in your back once you've walked away.
	And who's taken so much incoming really unjustifiably and handled it with a lot of grace, Kellyanne?
	I respect you.
	I admire you.
	And I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you.
	Thank you for reading the book, Megan, and for having me today.
	I hope to join you again.
	All the best to you and your family.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Back at you.
	And don't forget, the book is called Here's the Deal.
	She's right.
	It actually is a good beach read.
	I mean, you'll sit there with your husband or your spouse and you'll be like, listen to this, listen to this.
	Very, very open.
	It's out now.
	Thanks for listening, you guys.
	Don't forget to tune into the show tomorrow.
	We have Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer.
	Trust me when I tell you, you do not want to miss this interview.
	It's unbelievable.
	In the meantime, make sure you don't miss it by downloading the Megan Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
	You can subscribe to our show, please, at youtube.com slash MeganKelly.
	And in the meantime, thanks for listening.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:35 Mourn Uvalde Victims
00:04:49 Politician's Hubris Exposed
00:08:46 Blame Game Unfolds
00:22:36 Jersey Girl Profiled
00:25:00 Ballot Rumors Explained
00:35:03 George Conway Tweets
00:50:40 Marriage Under Scrutiny
01:03:49 Entitled Political Change
01:14:21 Friends Abandoned Over Tweets
01:27:57 Relationship With Daughter
01:36:58 Trump Runs Again