Kellyanne Conway hit out at a liberal graduate student who questioned her record during President-Elect Donald Trump‘s first term during a Harvard University discussion.
The former advisor to the president appeared at the Ivy League institution on Tuesday to discuss the 2024 presidential election and what challenges Trump may face in his second term.
But when audience members got a chance to ask Conway some questions, second-year Master of Public Policy student Jane Petersen took the opportunity to try to slam her for once claiming there were ‘alternative facts’ about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.
‘I wanted to ask you a question about your job as White House spokesperson,’ Petersen began. ‘In that role, you said things that were pretty audacious [and] caused people to question things that they have seen with their own eyes.
‘I was always wondering whether it was a survival response in what seemed like what was a very chaotic White House, or was it a strategy? So was it strategy or was it survival? You know, all the bantering with journalists the alternative facts. Was it strategy or was it survival?’
At first, Conway simply asked if Petersen knew what the term ‘alternative facts’ meant, to which she said, ‘I’m aware.’
‘Can you please explain it for us?’ Conway then challenged the girl. ‘Tell the person who uttered it on her third Sunday show of the day, looking into a blank camera, and then immediately said what I meant.’
The girl then seemed to backtrack, saying: ‘Well we could also do other examples.’
But Conway cut her off, urging Petersen to answer the question ‘to be fair.’
Kellyanne Conway hit out at a liberal graduate student who challenged her record during President-Elect Donald Trump’s first term
Jane Petersen, a second-year Master of Public Policy student, took the opportunity to try to slam her for once claiming there were ‘alternative facts’ about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration
‘You’re not going to go back eight years and do that,’ Conway said.
At that point, the master’s student tried to rephrase her question, saying she was asking Conway about her experience in the White House.
But still, Conway doubled down.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You gave me two choices and they’re inaccurate.’
Petersen then attempted to explain Conway’s use of the term ‘alternative facts,’ but when she mentioned she was ‘assuming,’ Conway once again hit out at her for that.
By then, the student said she thought it was ‘interesting that you decided to come here and know that you’re going to be accepting questions from students and yet -‘ prompting Kellyanne to respond.
‘OK so then I’ll answer it, thank you for your question,’ she said.
‘You gave me choices, and they’re both inaccurate,’ Conway replied, noting that it was ‘rich’ for Petersen to suggest her actions in the White House were a ‘survivor’s response… since you know nothing about me.’
Conway asked Petersen (pictured) if she knew what she meant when she used the term ‘alternative facts,’ to which she said she was ‘aware’
Conway insisted she answer the question ‘to be fair’
‘So alternative facts, I gave you a good chance there, and it’s a great chance for you because I don’t need any more air time, I get plenty of it,’ she continued.
‘First of all, my job was counselor to the president. I said “no” to press secretary. Forty-two minutes after President Trump was elected, he offered me that job. He said “You’d be great at that job,” I said “I would be terrible at that, I’m not even sure what they do.”
‘Some days I’m still not sure, and clearly I’m not sure after these four years,’ Conway said, taking aim at the Biden administration’s claims that the border is secure despite migrants flooding into the country.
‘President Biden is behind the scenes, he’s a trapeze artist and a triathlete. You just can’t see it,’ she insisted.
‘So I hope you take these same concerns to the people who’ve lied to your face for four years in this administration, all the way to this crushing defeat of a sitting vice president who should have been, who could have been the first female president of color in our nation’s history, but instead had to eat and own all the lies that had been told by this administration.’
Conway was at Harvard on Tuesday to discuss the 2024 presidential election and what challenges Trump may face in his second term
She then went on to note that there’s an entire chapter of her book, Here’s The Deal, in which she explains her use of the phrase ‘alternative facts.’
‘Alternative facts was very simple,’ Conway said. ‘It was, I meant to say “alternative information, additional facts.” It wasn’t George Orwell. It wasn’t a new set of facts.’
‘If you want to be judged by two words in your life, it will take me – it wouldn’t take me much time to find those two words,’ Conway insisted to Petersen.
‘But I don’t do that. I don’t look at people that way,’ she said. ‘I don’t look at people that way.’
She then said she was ‘really proud that I was able to tell people what was going on in the White House… I’m very happy to have told the country that I work for the president,’ going on to list some of Trump’s policies like tax cuts, trade deals and moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
‘So here’s what I do, I look at the full measure of people, and if the idea is to try to cut them down from one bad thing they said or one bad day they had or one article they wrote, then I wish you a much happier life than all that.
Conway concluded by saying she was proud to have served in Trump’s administration
‘So I don’t have an answer to a question that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, except to say that you can read my book about alternative facts, you can listen to the many interviews I gave about it.
‘It was never actually a different set of facts, and that’s pretty obvious,’ she said.
‘And I will say this, you go back to 2016, the media, who I guess just [makes] a whole living on getting the elections wrong – on that they’re consistent – they couldn’t get enough of Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway during the election, every show, every minute.
‘So I’m well on the record saying which states he was going to win, how he was going to win in 2016, where he was going to win. And then, he won and people changed. They turned just like that when we needed the media’s help to tell the country what’s going on, to co-parent the White House in the mainstream media, to responsibly co-parent the country for four to eight years’ Conway claimed, snapping her fingers.
‘Instead, they turn out to be a lot of deadbeat dads interested in not getting the story, but getting the president and tearing us down,’ she claimed.
