Kellyanne Conway on Sunday defended her famous assertion that the Trump administration’s lies are actually “alternative facts,” characterizing her remark as a flub similar to last week’s snafu over the best picture Oscar.
Back in January, Conway, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, had suggested that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer “gave alternative facts” about the audience at Trump’s inauguration. Simply put, Spicer had lied about the size of the crowd.
In an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning,” Conway claimed that she’d meant “alternative information and additional facts,” and she dismissed it all as just a mistake.
“That got conflated,” she told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell. “But, you know, respectfully, Norah, I see mistakes on TV every single day, and people just brush them off. Everybody thinks it’s just so funny that the wrong movie was, you know, heralded as the winner of the Oscars. You say, ‘Well, that’s just all in good fun, things happen.’ Well, things happen to everyone.”
At the recent Academy Awards ceremony, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were given the wrong envelope and announced that “La La Land” had won best picture, when the award actually went to “Moonlight.” Far from being “just so funny,” the mistake caused considerable confusion at the ceremony and overshadowed the historic nature of the “Moonlight” win. Later in the week, the two accountants in charge of tabulating the Oscar results lost that gig because they’d mixed up the envelopes and not intervened sooner.
On Sunday, Conway also defended another of her television flubs, the one where she made up a terrorist attack, “the Bowling Green massacre,” to justify Trump’s executive order banning travel and immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. After that incident last month, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” announced it would no longer book her on the show, saying that Conway was “not credible anymore.”
But Conway insisted that these missteps did not damage her credibility.
“What people should do, what I’ve always done with others, is look at the measure of someone’s career,” she said. “I’ve been a pollster for two decades-plus. And I’ve worked very hard to speak candidly and truthfully.”
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