Frank Bruni JAN. 11, 2017
If
you happened to watch CNN on Friday morning, you saw a brutal exchange about
Russian hacking between a righteous anchor with steam coming out of his ears
and a right-wing operative with ice in her veins.
“Chris Cuomo
bulldozes Kellyanne Conway,” said a headline in one of the many publications so
impressed by the encounter that they reported on it.
If you happened to
watch CNN on Monday morning, you saw that Conway was actually back with Cuomo
for more.
Surprised? Then you
don’t know the first thing about her.
She’s no mere
mouthpiece, no measly surrogate. She’s more like the David Blaine of political
spin, intent on working feats of magic that few others would attempt and
surviving situations that would cripple any ordinary mortal. He catches a
bullet in his mouth; she makes Donald Trump sound like a humble servant of the
common man. He lasts 44 days in a plexiglass case over the Thames; she lasts 40
minutes with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.
She reunited with
Cuomo not just to pooh-pooh Vladimir Putin’s misdeeds anew but to answer Meryl
Streep’s complaint about the way Trump once mocked a disabled
journalist. And she came up with that gem about disregarding the president-elect’s
words and judging him instead by what’s in his heart, which she apparently
knows to be good. She has done Blaine one better. She’s a stuntwoman and a
cardiologist.
As the cabinet nominees submit to their inquisitions and
Trump holds his first news conference since the election, there’s a surfeit of
political spectacle this week.
But
for sheer, jaw-dropping wonder, I doubt that any of it will improve on a
typical Conway television interview, which is a circus of euphemisms, a
festival of distractions and a testament to the stamina of a willed smile. She
looks cheery when attacking, even cheerier when attacked and absolutely radiant
when descending into a bog of half-truths and fictions. It’s always sunny on
Conway’s side of the street.
And it’s always a landslide when her candidate wins. She describes
Trump’s victory as a mandate — never mind its narrowness or all that Russian
nefariousness — and dismisses his critics by citing their inability to see that
heady triumph coming. They had no foresight. Now they have no grounds.
Waving
away what Hollywood stars said about Trump at the Golden Globes, she told Cuomo: “That place, this
network, frankly, all believed the election would turn out a different way.”
She also questioned
why Streep would go after Trump and not the “four young African-American adults
in Chicago screaming racial anti-Trump expletives” at a disabled young man in
that chilling Facebook Live video. Is this the new bar for taking Trump to
task? You can’t do it until you’ve completed a roll call of every bully in the
news?
“Saturday Night
Live” is transfixed by Conway, but they don’t get her quite right. As portrayed
by Kate McKinnon, she experiences pinpricks of horror over abetting Trump’s
ascent. The real-life Conway shows no such remorse. She’s exultant to the point
of taunting Hillary Clinton’s aides for their defeat, as she did when she
appeared with them at Harvard in December for an election post-mortem.
That was the
occasion of my favorite Conway-ism. She was asked if Trump’s baseless
insistence that he would have won the popular vote except for millions of
illegal ballots constituted presidential behavior.
“He’s
the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” she said.
Many journalists
don’t get Conway quite right, either, assigning her more power in Trump World
than she has. When you’re doing that much TV, you can be in only so many
meetings.
What she possesses is a showmanship that Trump can’t help
appreciating. I know dozens of people who despise her politics but are
mesmerized by her performances. She’s the Streep of “Fox & Friends” (of
“Morning Joe,” too) and a perfect emblem of these polarized times, when no
claim is too laughable or denial too ludicrous if it counters the supposed
insidiousness of the other side.
She’s also the
gold-haired standard for a rising generation of unflappable partisans. I
imagine that Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump apologist on CNN, studies her moves
the way a backup quarterback watches the starter. Should Conway go down with a
broken fibula, McEnany’s ready to lead the drive.
The
Trump booster Anthony Scaramucci is perhaps another of the sorceress’
apprentices. With MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle last week, he was Conway-esque in
pivoting from the questions he was asked to the answers he preferred to give.
But
he needs practice: I heard nothing at the altitude of Conway’s claim this week that the Democrats demanding more financial
information from Trump’s nominees were “political peeping Toms.” What pith.
What alliteration. What a year we’re in for.
