Kellyanne Conway defends Trump, draws mixed reaction at S.F. business event

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

Longtime top Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway was in San Francisco on Tuesday to share what her hosts, the Bay Area Council business group, billed as 'a unique window in this administration's thinking.'
But can you really trust the insights of the person who coined the phrase 'alternative facts'? Me, neither.
We largely got a predictable whitewashing of our orange president as Conway sought to spin everything Trump.
Though Trump gleefully brags about ending the national right to abortion, Conway said Trump is all about giving women more power by virtue of his hiring women for high ranking positions in his administration. And so on.
Conway spun away on everything from DOGE to DEI.
But what was unexpected was how so many of the Bay Area's top leaders are subtly adapting and reacting to the political realities of Trump 2.0, even as they rail against him.
Conway, who said she still regularly speaks to Trump even though she's no longer in the administration, wasn't in fighting mode Tuesday afternoon before the group that represents over 300 of the top employers in the region.
'I come in peace,' Conway said. With four teenage children at home, Conway said the opportunity to fly to San Francisco for the day to give a speech 'is like a spa day.'
Still, she wasn't above some snarky asides. Conway tartly noted, 'You had a San Franciscan (former Vice President Kamala Harris) in the White House for four years. You had her on the top of the ticket. I don't know that things have improved much. Maybe they did. I'll let you be the judge of that.'
The council's moderator felt a sort of need to explain/apologize to any snowflakes in attendance for platforming Conway. 'This isn't an endorsement,' Conway's interviewer Michael Covarrubias, a former chairman of the Bay Area Council, said as their chat began. 'It's about gathering intelligence' on the new administration, in the same way that any business would gather intel on their new market.
Not that there was a lot of intel produced in the volumes of spin spewed Tuesday. Some of Conway's answers occasionally veered toward answering the question asked. She did include a few bits of news-you-can-use, like tips for dealing with Trump:
'Don't be obsequious.' Conway advised. Trump hates that, she said. 'That's the dumbest thing to do with President Trump.' He doesn't want 'yes-men,' Conway insisted.
Which doesn't explain how he's gotten virtually no pushback from his Cabinet or from any Republican congressional member. Case in point: Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to call Russian President Vladimir Putin 'a war criminal' when he was a senator. But Rubio refused to do so last week at a House Foreign Affairs Committee now that he's being puppeteered by Trump
Yet Conway didn't have to flex Trump's influence here. The California panelists who followed her presentation — populated by the region's mayors and the leaders of its top universities — did that for her. If there's one positive thing Trump's victory did, it was to shame Democrats into spending less time virtue-signaling and more time focusing on proving they can govern.
The mayors of the Bay Area's three largest cities didn't mention Trump's name once during their sessions. Instead of performatively bragging how they were 'Trump-proofing' their cities or virtue-signaling how supportive they were of say, abortion rights, they talked about public safety and what they were doing to beef up their police departments. (Business groups always love to hear about more police to protect their investments. Save the feel good pronouncements about criminal justice reform for another crowd.)
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie bragged about his police department recently using technology to track people who attempted to carjack someone in San Francisco all the way to Emeryville, where police arrested three gun-toting alleged perpetrators. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan talked about how he wants to 'show what a pro growth, inclusive, upwardly mobile city looks like again.Recently sworn-in Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, who said she'd like Oakland to get '700-plus' officers (from about 678 now), said she was focused on making sure that the city is working for its residents. She promised to focus on 'How do we deliver services? ' like fixing a pothole or removing an encampment.
Conway had little sympathy for the millions in research funding Trump is cutting from university funding. Perhaps her disdain is rooted in how she continues to blame experts at federal health-related agencies for their handling of the COVID pandemic (but says nothing about how Trump once asked experts whether disinfectants could be injected to tackle COVID-19.)
'It's very frustrating to know that we were among the people that run NIH and CDC and FDA for years. It's not my job to know what's going to happen. It was theirs. It's very frustrating to know that we were all there together and like, 'Who's minding the store, who's looking out for this? ' That is their job. So the question is not whether research should continue, or health is important… the question is who should pay for it, and at what price?' Conway said.
UC Berkeley chancellor Rich Lyons said 'it would be very hard in any near term to backfill the federal government's role, because it's just so important.'
He anticipated that some 'indirect' or 'overhead' costs associated with research funding may be reduced. He said Berkeley could lose $100 million a year. Part of the reason that Trump and his DOGE master Elon Musk have been able to cut university funding is because, as Stanford president Jonathan Levin said, 'universities were collectively guilty of having done a truly terrible job explaining (research funding)to the American public. So there's lots of confusion about the details of how science funding works and or how endowments work, and the finances of universities and so forth, and we have to try to rectify that and try to explain it.'
Both said that they hoped that grants from foundations and private industry partnerships would make up for some of the loss of federal funding.
Conway also defended Trump for cutting $3.2 billion in federal grants and contracts recently from Harvard University and his attempt to end the university's right to enroll foreign students. Trump has cast the cuts as payback for the university's liberal bias, for continuing to use racial considerations in admitting students despite a legal ban against it, and for permitting antisemitic behavior on campus.
'There is rank, raw, disgusting antisemitism on many of our college campuses,' Conway said.
Berkeley's Lyons pushed back against the crackdown on free speech on campuses. He said a faculty member recently told him that 'It feels like we're going into a world where there are acceptable questions and unacceptable questions. That's anathema to academics. It's just sort of like all questions are accepted. We should be able to research, discover the reading and learn how different people can disagree.'
The audience applauded weakly at the pursuit of preserving free speech showing at least some resistance to Trump remains. As for Conway, she said Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked her to be a guest on his much maligned podcast. So she'll soon provide Californians with more 'intel' they didn't ask for.