On Monday, former Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway (who’s currently acting as one of his senior advisors) visited with CNN’s Chris Cuomo to discuss her boss’ continued Twitter outbursts. In the past few days alone, Trump expressed anger at SNL while demanding “equal time,” as if he expects the show to still lampoon Hillary Clinton. He also demanded an apology from the Hamilton cast for lecturing Mike Pence.
Cuomo — who was chipping away at the issue of “presidential” behavior — asked Conway, “Why take it up? Why take up ‘SNL’? No president does that. Why waste time? Why distract?” The gist of Conway’s retort was “Why do you care?” She continued: “In other words, who is to say that he can’t do that do that, make a comment, spend five minutes on a tweet and making a comment and still be the president-elect?” Cuomo wanted to know if Conway was absolving Trump of responsibility for his outbursts, and Conway replied that she wasn’t doing so, but, “You’re assigning malice, you’re assigning wrongdoing to him, where it doesn’t exist.”
Well, Trump certainly has the right to tweet, but the question remains whether he’ll continue to rage tweet as the leader while leading the country. Even Mike Pence, who was the center of the Hamilton furor, dropped the matter while insisting that he wasn’t offended by the cast’s address. Perhaps that’s where Pence’s experience as a political insider shows the most. He realizes that criticism will come no matter what, and that’s part of the job.