Donald Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway says she’s received Secret Service protection after getting boxes of “white substances” at her home. The development is only the latest in an ongoing war between Conway and a bizarrely hostile media.
The problem started, Conway says, when she criticized a reporter for Tweeting that Trump had removed a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office in order to make way for a bust of Winston Churchill. Conway alluded that the Tweet was not accidental, and part of a media plan to portray Trump as an abject racist.
The plan, she claims, backfired, but not before she was directly in the media’s cross-hairs, and since then, she’s become a top target—a position which now includes threats to her safety, and which she says she blames entirely on the media.
It fell to Conway to explain Sean Spicer’s comments on inaugural crowds, and her “alternative facts” quip is now a certified media meme.
But even as that interview faded with the week’s more pressing news, The Daily Show doubled down, saying that Conway not only lied about the crowd on the National Mall, but that she has “tells” for when she’s not speaking the truth.
By Monday, the New York Times had declared the Trump press operation a gaggle of liars. Recode’s media critics had decided that it was no longer worth journalists speaking to the Trump administration through either Spicer or Conway.
“I don’t think the people interviewing Kellyanne Conway know why they are doing that,” said Recode’s podcast host, NYU professor Jay Rosen. “The journalistic logic of it is growing dimmer with every interview.”
Just be real about it and say, “‘This isn’t actually of journalistic value,’” Rosen instructed. “‘It has a different value and that’s why we’re putting it on the air.’ Just don’t pretend that this is a normal interview, with the normal rationale.”
By Tuesday morning, online gossip columns began to buzz with what they considered to be unflattering story: that Conway had physically assaulted a man at an inaugural ball.
Conway, for her part, says that she and the media are just going to have to find a way to get along, if either hopes to succeed.
For now, that seems unlikely, as does Kellyanne Conway’s chance of being able to operate as a senior adviser in normal White House circumstances. After Conway’s mention of the Secret Service, a representative for the law enforcement division confirmed that it had, indeed, extended its Presidential protections to cover Trump’s top aide.
Of course, if that story about her breaking up an inauguration night fight is to be believed, her attackers may have a lot more to worry about.