Tuesday afternoon, in the tailwinds of the fight over Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s role in enabling pedophile and serial child rapist Jeffrey Epstein to get essentially what amounted to a slap on the wrist for Florida charges more than a decade ago related to his horrific assaults on what could end up being thousands of children, the topic was still as fresh as an open wound.
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi was holding an on-site update from the White House with correspondent Hans Nichols regarding the situation, knowing that Hans had just had an opportunity to hear Kellyanne Conway, the President’s senior counselor, answering questions on the White House lawn on the subject.
After summarizing Secretary Acosta’s hypocritical public tweets about Epstein, Velshi turned to Nichols, who witnessed Conway’s entire bizarre performance on Tuesday morning — which had included not only defense on the White House position on Acosta but also a strange attempt to insert herself into Democratic politics. Nichols recapped Kellyanne’s answer to his question about how much confidence Trump has in Acosta by setting up a video of her answer, and at that point, Conway proved she had no business speaking on the topic — because she clearly has no idea what Alex Acosta’s role in government even is.
The President said he met Alex Acosta two years ago when he applied for the job, he was happy to give him the job at the Department of Labor. And since then, through any number of reasons, beginning with the President, we’ve got a big jobs boom. And I do know when Alex Acosta was up for Senate confirmation, I believe that this particular matter was discussed, and was — he answered questions under oath about it.”
Kellyanne was so quick to get to the part where “nobody could have seen this coming and Trump had nothing to do with it” that she kind of breezed through exactly what Trump would have confidence in Acosta for. That’s when Ali Velshi stopped Nichols on the playback to clarify:
Hold the phone for a second here, Hans. You and I spend way more time than we should admit in public on government statistics sites and things like that. A ‘jobs boom’ has nothing to do with the Labor Secretary. The Labor Secretary, the Department of Labor, measures, evaluates, officiates over policies to do with labor… That’s just a weird connection to make.”
Nichols agreed, of course, but said what we’re all thinking: Trump is running for reelection on jobs and jobs alone — god knows he has no other popular achievements or policies — and if it means that he has to pretend his Secretary of Labor is integral to that, then so be it.
It’s just too bad he didn’t tell Kellyanne the plan before she went out there looking like a moron for having no idea what Acosta does.
Watch the segment here:
Featured image via screen capture
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