Kellyanne Conway, a key adviser to Donald Trump who ran his 2016 campaign, defended the president-elect’s behavior by saying that journalists should “look at what’s in his heart.”
CNN “New Day” host Chris Cuomo called out Trump for mocking a disabled New York Times reporter during a 2015 rally. But Conway insisted that’s not what he was doing.
“That is not what he did and he has said that 1,000 times,” she said Monday morning. “Why can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?”
Cuomo shot back, “He can say it a million times but look at the video... he’s making a disgusting gesture on video.”
“Why is everything taken at face value?” she asked. “You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart, you always want to go with what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”
The incident from the 2015 rally came up again Sunday night after Meryl Streep lambasted him during her Golden Globes speech.
“The person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back,” she said. “It kind of broke my heart.”
Trump responded to Streep on Twitter, saying, “I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad.”