Kellyanne Conway assails media for listening to what Trump says

Kellyanne Conway sure is a good fit with Donald Trump. How many other people out there can hope to match his shamelessness and disregard for the truth? Yet somehow, Conway manages it, day in, day out. Challenged by CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Trump’s 2015 mockery of a disabled New York Times reporter, Conway repeated Trump’s denials that he was doing what we all saw him on video doing, and asked “Why can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?” Cuomo was not interested in the benefit of the doubt, so Conway went all in.

“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.”

First of all, what comes out of the mouths of world-leaders-to-be is … kind of important. At a certain point—I’d argue it’s a point that comes in the teen years, at the latest, but definitely before one becomes a major presidential candidate—you have to accept that people are going to listen to the things you say and that you should speak accordingly and take a modicum of responsibility for your own words. Being a grown-ass man, a 70-year-old man in actual fact, one about to be inaugurated president, and sending your minions out to insist that what you say publicly in front of an audience should not be taken seriously? That’s one of the many things that would be pathetic if Trump’s upcoming inauguration didn’t make it flat-out terrifying.

But even if the world at large could adhere to a standard of not actually listening to what Donald Trump said, there’s still a problem. Namely, all efforts to look at what’s in Trump’s heart have led to the conclusion that it’s just as ugly as what comes out of his mouth.