JahFocus CS
Get It How You Get It
The article is long, so I'll post my favorite/most interesting excerpts. 
Kellyanne’s Alternative Universe
Will the truth ever catch up with Trump’s most skilled spin artist?
These motherfukkers are delusional. This country needs a Cultural Revolution to abolish white supremacy.
Exactly one year ago, she was on air dragging Trump's name through the mud.
Kellyanne’s Alternative Universe
Will the truth ever catch up with Trump’s most skilled spin artist?
Winning, Conway contended, was exactly what Trump was doing as president—just look at the number of executive actions he’d already signed. He was outpacing Obama, she said. “Not that it’s a contest.” When I told her I recalled Republicans depicting Obama’s executive orders as Constitution-defying, dictatorial abuses of power, she replied, “Well, I don’t know that I would have said that.”
During the transition, Conway began publicly criticizing, on Twitter and on television, Trump’s consideration of Mitt Romney for secretary of state. Romney and Trump were in the midst of a high-profile courtship, and Romney was reportedly a leading contender for the job, when Conway tweeted that she was receiving a “deluge” of feedback from Trump fans who would feel “betrayed” by Romney’s selection.
“What were his special qualifications for that, is all I asked,” she told me. “Losing Michigan by 10 points, when Donald Trump won the state, certainly wouldn’t have been a qualification. Was Mitt Romney negotiating cease-fires in Aleppo and somehow I missed it?”
The public airing of such a sensitive personnel matter caused a sensation. It was suggested that Conway had “gone rogue,” and on Morning Joe, Trump was said to be “furious” with her for her insubordination. She called him up to see whether this was true. He said it was not, and she proceeded to explain why she was so opposed to Romney: She hadn’t forgiven him for his role in the “Never Trump” movement, including a speech calling Trump a “con man.”
“I just told him that I know how things go,” she explained: “Every single time Secretary of State Mitt Romney would have deplaned in a foreign country … they would go to the B-roll of him in front of the orange-and-white background, mocking Trump Water, Trump Steaks, Trump’s character, his integrity, his message—him. And that would never have gone away, and he deserves better.”
Conway’s hometown of Atco, New Jersey, is the sort of featureless place that takes its name from a corporate acronym—Atco is short for the Atlantic Transport Company, which, at the turn of the 20th century, ordered some ships built nearby. She prides herself on staying rooted here, in the Real America that fancy people can’t quite grasp—the America that defied conventional wisdom and handed Trump the presidency. Conway can claim to speak for Trump’s base, that is, because she’s one of them.
Just off White Horse Pike, a single-story stone house sits on a raised mound of earth that makes it tower above its neighbors, its driveway a steep slope. When I rang the bell one afternoon in early February, Conway’s 73-year-old mother, Diane Fitzpatrick, answered the door. “My mom always wanted a house on a hill,” Fitzpatrick said, by way of explanation. “So my father built a hill.”
Fitzpatrick welcomed me into the dining room. The walls were a bright, cheerful yellow, the windows hung with filmy curtains. Every surface was choked with clutter—silk plants, prescription bottles, angel figurines, crosses, little plaques with sayings about family and faith. Through a doorway I could see an enormous framed photograph of Conway and her family hanging over the fireplace; on a set of shelves were a signed photo of Trump and a Mother’s Day note from him. The house was a shrine—to God, to Trump, and to Kellyanne.
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Fitzpatrick told me her grandparents came from Italy, noting indignantly that they were held at Ellis Island until they could be thoroughly checked—unlike today’s immigrants, she said, who just come right in. “We never wanted anything handed to us,” she said. “My father hated credit cards—‘If you don’t have the money, you don’t need it.’ ” In her day, she added, children respected their parents. “It’s not like the kids you see today, where there’s so much hate in the world.” After a botched back surgery in 2001 left Fitzpatrick unable to stand for long periods, she sued her doctor and retired on permanent disability.
The country, as she described it, is at the mercy of atheists and agitators who want to tell “the majority” how to live their lives. Fitzpatrick was kindly and hospitable, serving me coffee and snacks in neat little bowls. But once she got going, she could barely contain her disgust at the snobs and celebrities who were not giving the new president the chance he deserved—people like Ashton Kutcher, who lambasted Trump at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January. “I’d like to kick the TV in, honest to God.”
President Obama “pitted the blacks against the whites,” she said. “If something happened to a black person, he and his wife were right there. But if something happened to a white person, you never saw them, did you?” Attending the inauguration with her daughter, Fitzpatrick was relieved to hear God mentioned for what she believed was the first time in eight years.
These motherfukkers are delusional. This country needs a Cultural Revolution to abolish white supremacy.
Conway went to law school at George Washington University and accepted an offer to work for a D.C. firm, but reneged when Luntz asked her to join his polling company instead. They traveled the world together, and loved to play pranks, such as pretending they were husband and wife and having a noisy argument in an elevator. After a few years, she left to start her own company. While building her business, Luntz told me, Conway said things about him that hurt his feelings, and the two didn’t speak for several years. They have since reconnected.
A few firms dominate Republican campaign polling, and Conway’s was never one of them. But she carved out a niche helping politicians and corporations understand women. Though she’s an unapologetic career woman who married at 34 and had the first of her four children at 37, Conway views feminism as unnatural and man-hating. She says “femininity” is more important, is strongly opposed to abortion, and thinks that women should cherish traditional roles, not a sense of victimhood. The post-inauguration Women’s March left her notably unmoved. “Marching on the Mall with vagina hats on?” she said. “Your mom must be so proud.”
In the 1990s, Conway began appearing often on TV, spouting the standard Republican line on Bill Maher’s and Chris Matthews’s shows. She seemed like a member in good standing of D.C.’s political-hack crowd. But as a pollster, she worked for certain groups that other Republicans avoided or dismissed as fringe, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones,” and the Center for Security Policy, a think tank headed by Frank Gaffney Jr., which has been accused of pushing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Her 2015 poll for the center claimed to show that a majority of American Muslims supported Sharia law in the United States, but it was widely criticized for methodological flaws; that December, Trump cited it when he first proposed banning Muslims from entering the country.
After Romney lost the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee concluded, in its “autopsy” report, that the party needed to broaden its appeal. Supporting immigration reform, and thus bringing in Hispanic voters, was the only way forward—a position shared across the Republican establishment, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Chamber of Commerce to the Koch brothers. Donald Trump, then hosting The Apprentice, said Romney had lost because his “self-deportation” policy alienated Hispanic voters.
But there was another view: that Romney lost because he’d failed to inspire white working-class people, many of whom stayed home in 2012. This idea, laid out by an analyst named Sean Trende for RealClearPolitics and known as the “missing whites” theory, became the major counterpoint to the GOP autopsy. It held that Republicans didn’t need to do better with minorities; they could instead turn out a bigger share of white voters, particularly rural, blue-collar white voters.
One way Republicans could win, Conway believed, was by arguing for stricter immigration policies. She told me she had long understood how the issue resonated with struggling voters. They were willing to do unglamorous jobs to support their families—to hang drywall or mow lawns—but found themselves undercut by immigrants who would “work under the table for peanuts.” It wasn’t fair, but the elites—and many politicians—didn’t seem to think their concerns were even worth mentioning.
In 2014, Conway was part of a group of Republicans that produced a poll for FWD.us, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration-advocacy nonprofit. It showed that immigration reform was a political necessity for the GOP—a finding at odds with the line Conway had been pushing since the 1990s. Two months later, she produced a different poll, demonstrating that “enforcement of current law” and “encouraging illegal immigrants to return to their home countries” could be a winning message. She presented her findings to a group of Republican donors, who rebuffed her. But the poll found favor with opponents of immigration reform. The far-right website Breitbart .com (then headed by Bannon) hailed it as a “blockbuster.”
The poll was credited to Conway, but it was paid for, I discovered, by the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA, a longtime client of hers. After she circulated her findings, Republicans began to embrace previously taboo positions. NumbersUSA’s executive director, Roy Beck, watched in amazement as one Republican presidential candidate after another—Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, even Jeb Bush—began parroting his group’s arguments. Trump was the most ardent convert. “Trump started out at, like, a C-minus” on the group’s report card, Beck told me. But he got with the program. “He just kept improving, focusing his message more and more on what was good for the worker.”
Conway says she recognized early in the 2016 campaign that Trump was connecting with voters. But despite an early overture from Trump, she initially signed on to run a super pac supporting Ted Cruz.
Exactly one year ago, she was on air dragging Trump's name through the mud.
