Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway took a liberal Harvard student to the woodshed with a lesson on “alternative facts” that will not be soon forgotten.
Conway answered questions after a discussion at Harvard on Tuesday about President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in the White House and her role in his administration. Jane Petersen, a second-year Master of Public Policy student at the Ivy League school, asked Conway about some of her “audacious” remarks when she served as the president’s senior counselor.
“I wanted to ask you a question about your job as White House spokesperson,” Petersen said. “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?” the student asked.
When she told Conway she was “aware” of what the term “alternative facts” meant, Conway asked her to explain it to the audience, adding, “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.”
“Well we could also do other examples,” Petersen said scrambling to get back to her point before Conway interjected, asking the student to answer the question “to be fair.”
“You’re not going to go back eight years and do that,” Conway noted as Petersen tried to clarify her questioning.
“No,” Conway said. “You gave me two choices and they’re inaccurate.”
The exchange continued with Conway holding the master’s student to account until she protested that it “was ‘interesting that you decided to come here and know that you’re going to be accepting questions from students and yet -”
“OK so then I’ll answer it, thank you for your question,” Conway said, calling out Petersen for suggesting her actions were a “survivor’s response… since you know nothing about me.”
“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 told the student.
“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,'” Conway continued. “Some days I’m still not sure, and clearly I’m not sure after these four years.”
“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 said.
She then elaborated more on her use of the term “alternative facts.”
“It was, I meant to say ‘alternative information, additional facts.’ It wasn’t George Orwell. It wasn’t a new set of facts,” she told Petersen.
“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 added. “But I don’t do that. I don’t look at people that way.”
