Trump hits back at Kellyanne Conway for admitting that he lost in 2020

Former President Donald Trump is denying a key anecdote in a former aide’s new book, saying he would have banished Kellyanne Conway from his inner circle if she had ever told him he lost the 2020 presidential election.

In a Thursday morning post on his social media network, Truth Social, Trump refuted Conway’s assertion that she “may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time.”

“Kellyanne Conway never told me that she thought we lost the election. If she had, I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer — she would have been wrong — could go back to her crazy husband,” Trump wrote. “Writing books can make people say some very strange things. I wonder why?”

Conway served as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and was a counselor to the president in the White House. She has remained close to him since she left the administration at the end of summer 2020.

For all their years working together, Trump has seldom criticized Conway even as he’s attacked her husband, attorney George Conway, who helped start the anti-Trump organization the Lincoln Project and has been an outspoken critic of the ex-president. In her book, “Here’s the Deal,” Conway writes about the challenges that came with her husband publicly feuding with her boss.

“I had already said publicly what I'd said privately to George: that his daily deluge of insults-by-tweet against my boss — or, as he put it sometimes, "the people in the White House" — violated our marriage vows to "love, honor, and cherish" each other,” Conway writes.

But it was Conway’s admission that Trump lost the election that stood out most in the book’s 506 pages. In stating the obvious, Kellyanne Conway became one of the few, currently close Trump allies to implicitly reject his false claims of a stolen election. Trump has continued to deny he lost in 2020 and has propagated that false notion among his millions of supporters.

Claims from Trump and his allies about widespread, coordinated fraud, of which there has been no conclusive evidence, motivated a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to overturn the election results.

In her book, Conway mainly points her finger at the Trump campaign for the loss in 2020, and says Trump and his over $1 billion in campaign funds were mismanaged in the final months of the election. But she also writes that voters have every right to question the election process.

“What happened in 2020 can never fully be understood,” Conway writes. “There has been no silver bullet that proves Donald Trump was the rightful winner as many have claimed.”