Kellyanne Conway flipped the tables on Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, accusing the California Democrat of treating her like her “maid” during an exchange at the White House the day before.
Pelosi accused Trump of throwing a “temper tantrum” when he abruptly ended an infrastructure meeting with Democrats Wednesday, but Conway said Pelosi is the one with an attitude problem. The White House adviser said that Trump “calmly” left the meeting and that Pelosi snapped at her after Trump left.
“She treats me like I’m either her maid or her driver or her pilot or her makeup artist,” Conway said. “And I’m not. I said to her, ‘How very pro-woman of you,’ per usual, because she’s not very pro-woman, she’s pro some women, a few women.”
The feud erupted between Pelosi and Trump when the House speaker accused the president of a criminal “cover-up” just moments before the failed meeting. Trump cut the meeting off over Pelosi’s comments, then proceeded to hold an impromptu press conference in the Rose Garden where he called on Democrats to end their investigations if they want to work with him.
Trump’s alleged “tantrum”
Pelosi has feigned concern for Trump’s mental health since the infrastructure dust-up, accusing him of throwing a “temper tantrum” Thursday and snarking that his family and administration should stage an “intervention for the good of the country.” But Conway told a very different story to Fox Thursday.
“‘The president was in a rage,’ ‘He’s fuming,’ ‘He stormed out,’ ‘Temper tantrum,’ there was none of that,” Conway mocked. “He actually never raised his voice. He came in, sat at the end of the table in the Cabinet room outside the Oval, and said, ‘Look folks, I want to do infrastructure; I want to do great things for this country. We’ve been doing great things for this country. But within this last hour you had a meeting and came out and said I’m engaged in a cover-up; that’s not true.'”
Conway said that Trump challenged Pelosi on the “cover-up” comments, but was otherwise polite and “calmly” left the meeting. Conway suggested that Pelosi could have scheduled her Wednesday morning caucus meeting to discuss impeachment at a different time — not minutes before she was planning to speak with the president about infrastructure.
“But he took the case directly to Nancy Pelosi because she was the one who came to the mics and said that the president was engaged in a cover-up, which is nonsense,” Conway said. “All she had to do was either move her meeting to later in the afternoon with her caucus where she’s under enormous pressure to get on with impeaching the president, which she has said she doesn’t want to do right now. Or she could have said, ‘I’m not going to talk to you right now; we’re on our way to the White House to work on infrastructure. Let’s meet again at 2 or 3 o’clock and I’ll give you the run-down of the whole day.”
“I don’t talk to staff”
Contrary to the Democrat narrative about the meeting, Conway said, Pelosi treated Conway like she was “her maid.” After Trump left, Conway alleges, Pelosi began to ramble on an “odd” tangent about Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson, comparing the two presidents favorably with Trump.
When Conway asked Pelosi if she had a response to what Trump brought up, Pelosi snapped. Conway shot back, telling Pelosi she isn’t very “pro-woman.”
“When she was finished I said, respectfully, ‘Madam Speaker, would you like to address some of the specifics the president talked about?’” Conway said. “She said…’I talk to the president, I don’t talk to staff.’ [But] you know, let’s face it, she’s the sixth-most-rich member of Congress. She treats everybody like they’re her staff.”
Losing control
Conway first shared her version of the story Wednesday with reporters at the White House after the meeting fell apart. Pelosi shot back Thursday, saying merely, “I’m not going to talk about her.”
The infrastructure dust-up brought the rivalry between Trump and Pelosi to a vicious, personal level not seen since the government shut down earlier this year, and the two have been engaged in an escalating war of words since then. At her weekly presser Thursday, Pelosi joked about removing Trump from office with the 25th Amendment and said for the second time in as many days that she would pray for Trump’s soul.
At his Rose Garden presser Wednesday, Trump called on Democrats to end their investigations and expressed his dismay that “instead of walking happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up.” Trump continued to attack Pelosi Thursday at another press conference, labeling her “crazy” while blasting the Democrats as a “do nothing” party.
Temper trap?
The feud erupted as Pelosi faces mounting pressure from within her caucus to go forward with impeachment. Democrats have grown impatient with Trump’s stonewalling of their various investigations and subpoenas, as they look to move on from Robert Mueller’s investigation of collusion to prosecute an independent, partisan witch hunt.
For her part, Conway said that Pelosi can’t “control her temper” any more than she can control her party.
The White House adviser also flipped another narrative on its head earlier this week: that Trump set up the meeting as a “trap.” Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have accused Trump of setting up the meeting as a “stunt” and using their investigations as an “excuse” to walk away from a meeting he wasn’t prepared for, but Conway said that Trump came prepared to work for the American people — until Pelosi ruined it less than an hour before.
“They ruined it by an hour before that basically, with her car running, waiting for her saying he’s engaged in a cover-up and then coming over here and pretending everything’s great and then we’re just going to discuss infrastructure,” Conway said. It just wasn’t going to happen.
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