Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, said Thursday that Republican nominee Trump does not regret choosing Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate and would make the same decision today if given the chance.
Political journalist Tim Alberta noted in a live interview at The Atlantic Festival 2024 that Biden was leading in the polls when Trump chose him as his running mate, and members of the former president's campaign “had openly told me and The Atlantic that he would win by a landslide margin of 325 electoral votes.”
“At that point, selecting Vance felt like an indulgence on their part. He was more like picking a potential successor and someone to add to the shortlist, rather than a governing partner,” Alberta said, asking whether Trump would have picked someone else if he'd known Biden would be dropping out of the race in just days.
“No, he's wanted Senator Vance all along,” Conway responded. “He's gone back and forth on the last three nominees and he's said that publicly. So I'm not saying anything that people haven't heard.”
She continued, “So I think he was always looking for someone that he felt was willing to go into enemy territory, into the lion's den of television, because he saw J.D. Vance on CNN, MSNBC, the three major networks, fearlessly speaking about putting America first.”
“He loves his life story. He loves the incredible academic background, like Yale Law School, but he also loves the story of the American Dream.”
She posed the same question to Democrats during the interview.
“I actually think that the whole construct that you're asking me is a question for Vice President Harris as well as for Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania,” said Conway, who served as Trump's campaign manager in 2016, noting that the decision was “a no-brainer.”
Trump allies believe some of the controversy surrounding Vance is already “cooked in,” noting the public knows the first-term senator has been highly critical of the former president and of childless women who own cats.
“I think it was a mistake to turn the pressure on him full force in the first day or two,” she said of the negative media coverage of Vance in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. “Here's why. What else can you do? I mean, if you want to hurt somebody, just spit it on them a little at a time.”
“But the press was all, like, drowning him, and they thought Trump was going to leave him without a lifeboat,” she continued. “Trump's not going to do that. He's not going to do that, any more than he's going to fire his campaign team.”
Conway added that the advice to Trump to remove Vance from the nomination “came from people who hate Trump and will never vote for him, and who have spent years convincing us behind the scenes, out of public view, that President Joe Biden is a trapeze artist and a triathlete. So I'm glad Trump ignored that advice.”
