White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is a real-life Cruella de Vil from “101 Dalmatians,” according to a former Trump administration colleague’s new book.
Cliff Sims, an ex-special assistant to the president and assistant communications director for White House message strategy, excoriates Conway in his memoir “Team of Vipers,” describing how “it became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life” over the course of his 500 days in the West Wing.
“Her agenda — which was her survival over all others, including the president — became more and more transparent. Once you figured that out, everything about her seemed so calculated; every statement, even a seemingly innocuous one, seemed poll-tested by a focus group that existed inside her mind,” Sims writes in an excerpt published by Vanity Fair on Wednesday. “She seemed to be perennially cloaked in an invisible fur coat, casting an all-knowing smile, as if she’d collected 98 Dalmatians with only 3 more to go.”
Sims, an Alabama conservative media company founder who was once touted as a possible replacement for fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Senate, also recalls in the book being summoned to Conway’s office in May 2017 to help draft a statement refuting claims from MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough that she trashed Trump behind his back, despite defending him on TV. Once there, she asked him to type a response on her personal MacBook laptop, which was synced to her iPhone’s iMessage account.
“Kellyanne was sitting at her desk texting away,” he writes. “Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing ‘fake news.’ Journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, and Bloomberg were all popping up on the screen. And these weren’t policy conversations, or attempts to fend off attacks on the president. As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer, all by name.”
Conway on Wednesday hit back at Sim’s account.
“The real leakers, past and present, get much more positive press than I do. While it’s rare, I prefer to knife people from the front, so they see it coming,” Conway said in a statement to Vanity Fair after it published the excerpt. Sims’ “Team of Vipers” is set for release on Jan. 29.
[Also read: Kellyanne Conway warns media bullies: ‘I am watching’]
