Former President Trump is disputing a claim from Kellyanne Conway, one of his closest aides while he was in the White House, that she told him he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has repeatedly denied his loss, and false claims about the election contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters — and efforts to make changes to future elections around the country.
“Kellyanne Conway never told me that she thought we lost the election,” Trump wrote Thursday in a post on his new social media website. “If she had, I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer — she would have been wrong — could go back to her crazy husband.”
Conway is married to George Conway, a Washington attorney and Republican who clashed with Trump throughout his presidency. George Conway was a founding member of the anti-Trump political action committee The Lincoln Project.
Kellyanne Conway writes in a new memoir, which was published this week, that she “may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time.”
Trump’s top aides and allies in the weeks that followed the election falsely suggested in media appearances and social media posts that the election was not conducted fairly and had been “rigged” against the former president.
Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who served as a top counselor to the president, departed the White House in August of 2020.
Conway writes openly about her marriage in the book and criticizes the media for how journalists covered the public feud and the social media postings of her then-15-year-old daughter.
Trump has rarely been critical of Kellyanne Conway publicly since she left his administration.
“Writing books can make people say some very strange things,” Trump said on Thursday.
Updated at 9:38 a.m.