“She was a cartoon villain brought to life.”
This is how former White House aide Cliff Sims describes Trump’ former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway in his memoir, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House.
In excerpts obtained and released in Vanity Fair, Sims goes on to give numerous examples of Ms. Conway bad-mouthing current and former top members of the Trump administration.
As I watched Kellyanne in operation over our time in the White House, my view of her sharpened.
It became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life.
Her agenda – which was her survival over all others, including the president- became more and more transparent.
(Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House)
Although Sims described her as the former president’s pit bull, he also describes her as a “leaker.”
He explains how he was using Conway’s laptop at her request for work purposes and saw multiple ongoing conversations in which Ms. Conway was bashing top ranking members of the Trump administration including Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Steve Bannon to reporters from CNN, NYT, Politico, Bloomberg, and more.
Kellyanne was playing a double game—putting a foot in both worlds—telling Trump and his supporters on Fox one thing, while bad-mouthing them to the “mainstream” media in private.
It didn’t hurt matters with the latter group that her husband, George, was an increasingly frequent critic of the president on Twitter.
If the Trump administration was the Titanic, as many outsiders routinely claimed, then Kellyanne seemed determined to play the role of the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She wasn’t going to go down with this ship.
(Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House)
