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Well, welcome to the Jason and House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and I appreciate you joining us because we're going to have a good show today, and I'm glad that you're going to join us. Kellyanne Conway is going to join us. You want to talk about somebody who's had an impact on politics and changed the dynamics of how politics happen behind the scenes. Kellyanne is that person, and I'm
I'm thrilled to chat with her. I've gotten to know her a little bit and spend a little bit of time with her through the years, but I've never really had that in-depth conversation with her about anything.
how she got to be in such a powerful position. And she's wicked smart on this stuff. So I look forward to chatting with her. We're going to talk a little bit about the news. And then, of course, we're going to highlight the stupid because, as you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And so let's get right after. I want to talk about a little bit of the news. It's going to start off slow, get a little big, a little bit...
and a little bit heavier along the way. I read that Dwayne, the rock Johnson. Now I love the rock. I love this guy. Great actor. A lot of fun. Always has a smile on his face. And he joked that he finally, uh, quote exercised this damn chocolate demon and quote, uh,
He evidently returned to Hawaii, 7-Eleven, where he claimed that he had used to steal a Snickers bar.
Every day he'd go into the 7-Eleven, he'd steal a Snickers bar. As a 14-year-old, he just said, hey, look, I was dirt poor. I shouldn't have done it. So he went back to 7-Eleven and bought every Snicker bar they could possibly muster up just to atone for overstealing when he was a little kid.
And my guess is he never had a time when he was a little kid. I remember when I was a young kid, I was, I think, probably nine or 10 years old. And I actually grabbed a piece of candy that my mom said I couldn't have. And I stuffed it in my pocket and I went home and I ate it and I got busted. And I felt I have felt guilty ever since. And years and years and years later, I went back to a store and dropped them a $10 bill and said, just
Just trust me. I owe you this. And they had no idea what I was talking about, but I felt better. But I'm glad to see The Rock atone for his petty theft there. Now, on a little bit more serious note, some numbers came out. And in 2021...
The retail shrink, as they call it. This is the cost of thefts and whatnot. The cost of the industry is up. It's $94.5 billion in losses. Now, that isn't all these individual Snickers bars. This is the fact that the numbers have changed dramatically in the last few years. It's up 4% year over year, but nearly doubled the $50.6 billion in just 2018.
And this comes from the National Retail Federation. You have stores that are closing. So you have these woke policies, these district attorneys that won't enforce the law. You have a catch and release program where, hey, we're not going to really prosecute you. We're not even going to bother to respond to these stores. And so, you know what? The numbers become so large and it's not just a Snickers bar there.
You're talking about people who just brazenly go in and steal stuff, walk out. The local security, the local police don't even respond because they know nobody's going to be prosecuted for this stuff.
The report shows cases of organized retail crime rings where they know where the thresholds are for prosecution. They stay right under that. And, you know, I guess what's really important here is that, look, they go online and then they resell this stuff. So if you think you got some smoking deal online with a brand new piece of clothing or a brand new something, this or that,
Just be a little cautious that, you know what, this may be people just stealing this stuff, going online, selling it at a discounted rate. The report says that that type of transactions surged more than 26 percent, 26 percent from the year prior.
So it's become a big, big issue, and it's something that is affecting all of us. We look at the causes of inflation. This is one of them. Because guess what? All that stuff is stolen. They put that into the pricing of their products moving forward. All right, next one to me is very serious, and it's something I hope everybody's aware of.
Special counsel has been appointed to investigate Donald Trump yet again. You know, we did the Mueller investigation. He did all this stuff. Now there's another special counsel. But I do not understand how this special counsel, Jack Smith, is allowed to participate in the position that he is given that his wife and I'm going to I'm going to mispronounce it because a caddy sheving me, I think is how you say her name.
she was a producer of a film called Becoming, which is the 2020 documentary about Obama. Now, how is it that you go from supposed independence as a special prosecutor and your wife is a filmmaker who produced a movie about the former first lady, Michelle Obama, and donated to President Biden's 2020 campaign? Do you think Joe Biden...
has now appointed somebody that's going to be fair, impartial. It doesn't really appear to that. And appearance is a lot of things. If you're going to garner the trust of the American people, that whatever you do in this investigation of Donald Trump that may or may not ultimately lead to a prosecution, you have to have the appearance and the reality of impartiality. But obviously these people, this couple is not
Just given the background of what they've done, donating to the rival, to participating and putting together a glorified movie, supposedly a documentary about Michelle Obama. Do you really think Donald Trump's going to get a fair and balanced approach in that setting? I don't think so. And that's why there continues to be so many people concerned about this appearance that the Department of Justice has a political bias here.
You're telling me that the 110,000 people working at the Department of Justice, they couldn't find one person who didn't have a major conflict of interest? And you can't tell me that they didn't think about this or look at this and shame on them if they didn't. I don't know what's worse. Anyway, I think it's totally wrong. It probably should have been in the category of our next segment, but...
It's not. I think it's newsworthy, and I hope we continue to look at this and press the administration to say this is just not fair right from the start. All right, time to bring on the stupid, because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right, we go to Twitter. A lot of news out on Twitter, right? A lot of news recently. But Yoel Roth, okay, he was the safety chief recently.
And he sat down with Kara Swisher for an interview. And this Yoel Roth said, quote, we didn't know what to believe. We're talking about the Hunter Biden laptop story that got suppressed right before the election. We didn't know what to believe. We didn't know what was true. There was smoke. And ultimately for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.
But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT 28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells. And yet they made the decision and a decision, by the way, that always, always goes against Republicans, always goes against conservatives. And in this case, always going against the New York Post in that their content that they put out into the Twitter verse got suppressed.
So he's out saying, oh, well, whoops, I think it was a mistake. We didn't know what to believe. Then why did they do it? If they didn't have conclusive evidence, you know, it's sort of like the video replay that you see in football or soccer or something like that. You have to have conclusive proof to take down somebody's content. And they didn't. Anyway, I know this is just, I just think,
This is comments that he made before Elon Musk released all this information out there about the algorithms that Twitter has. And you know what? I'm sorry, but you all Roth. It's a little bit late to say, oh, whoops, I was a mistake. That to me is just flat out stupid. All right, let's let's move on because I want to call Kellyanne Conway. I'm really looking forward to this discussion. So let's give her a ring.
Hello. Hey, Kellyanne, this is Jason Chaffetz. Oh, hi, Jason. How are you today? Thank you so much. Thanks for answering the phone. You know, it's amazing. Caller ID, which I didn't have when I was growing up. I can't believe you picked up. So thank you. I appreciate it.
I did. You know, as teenage girls, we are accustomed to waiting by the phone. You know, yeah, right. So it's funny. I was just thinking, you know, back in the day when you would call somebody, I was kind of dating myself a little bit. You know, we had rotary phones. We had busy signals when you actually called. Things were a little different back then.
Very different. I had the cool phone I was allowed to have starting at 13 or 14 in my room. It was round and it was white and it was totally cool. And I spent untold hours in that room with my girlfriends.
dialing other people, calling up boys, emergency breakthroughs that really weren't emergencies. You could actually get an operator on the phone to help you out. But we weren't multitasking, by the way, Jason. We were very focused on the phone call. There was no internet. There was no texting. There was no Snapchat. There was nothing else. It was the radio and the phone. So we were very focused on our mission set, which was basically to make plans at the roller skating rink or
you know, someone else's house. But yeah, I talked to Jason. It reminded me I've got this new thing in my repertoire and you're going to love it because it's it absolutely fits with the good old days and telephones. I like to say one of the reasons that Republicans didn't do as well in these last midterms is apart
from all the things that you and I and many others have led to the conversation, Jason, I'm convinced it's because people really leaned into and accept and swallowed wholesale this rosy polling. So every Republican was winning by double digits everywhere, according to this
One firm I have in mind, and I said, you know, just accepting rosy polling and cherry picking the results that you want, the info that you want to hear, not that you need to know, reminds me of every Saturday morning when I was 16 or 17, a group of us girls would get together and we'd all meet at my friend Christine's house to get weighed because her scale always had us three pounds lighter than we were.
And we knew that. We knew the scale was three pounds lighter, but I'll be darned if we got weighed in anybody else's house, including our own, except for Christine's house every Saturday morning. And that's what that reminds me of right now in politics. We're only going to accept the rosy polling and swallow the results that make us feel better and not
really give us direction and make us fight for these seats, then we're going to get what we deserve. Well, you wrote a book called Here's the Deal, and you've done some amazing polling yourself and obviously been at the highest echelons of of politics. So why do you think these why did these pollsters get it so wrong?
Well, some did. And look, I think actually the media polls were a little bit better this time. I've been highly critical of the mainstream media polling, Jason, over time, not really having an interest in reflecting American public opinion, but in creating it and manipulating it. So I'll give you a few quick examples. In 2020, the ABC News Washington Post poll overlapped.
a week or two before the election, said Joe Biden was beating Donald Trump in Wisconsin by 17 points. That poll never should have been released, let alone shared and promoted worldwide. Why? Because neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden were leading the other by 17 points in Wisconsin. That's why it's Wisconsin. It's a swing state. We all know that. Each of them now has won that state back-to-back, Jason, by far less than a percentage point.
So this time I thought that the mainstream media polls got a little bit better in representing the hidden Trump/Pence voter, for example, or grassroots folks who believe in the America First agenda, whether they'll vote for Trump again in the future is beside the point in terms of who they are in these midterms, which is they want the America First agenda. They want center right solutions.
What went wrong this time were a lot of the insider advantage, Matt Cahaly. That's Matt Cahaly over at Trafalgar Group. I'll just call it out. Getting millions and millions of dollars to put polls out there that, frankly, had everybody winning. Tiffany Smiley is competitive. Balda, Tudor Dixon, Joe O'Day. I just mentioned four very different candidates in very different races.
And in every single instance, those candidates lost by double digits. And I just put this out there, Adam Laxalt's a friend of mine. I wish he had been governor four years ago when he ran. I wish he were the United States Senator and waiting right now, Jason. I know we all worked hard for Adam Laxalt. The last poll my firm put out there for Dave Bossie's group said Laxalt was losing by one and Joe Lombardo, the Republican former sheriff of Clark County
And also a veteran, great candidate that we had him beating incumbent Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak by two points. That's exactly what happened. And I felt sick in my stomach, really, to have to release a poll that showed Adam losing by a percentage point because every other poll had him winning by five. I went back and looked at the RealClearPolitics. But I think if you have him winning by five, we're sort of depressing our own vote.
Because if we're telling people, don't vote until day of, don't have trust in the machines, don't do mail-in ballots, show up on election day, we're taking a huge chance, Jason, that people can get out of the House that day, that life doesn't intervene and go and vote that day. I think we should be banking these votes early.
The other thing is polls really are not, listen, you're an elected official. You actually had your name on a ballot and were successful in doing so. So you know all this better than anybody who's listening better than me. But here's the deal with polling. It really is not a good measure to predict a precise outcome politically. It's supposed to show us the trends. And I think where the pollsters got it right this time and where I give the Republican candidates a ton of credit, Jason, is Americans told every single pollster for over a year,
that they disapproved of Joe Biden's job performance overall on the top 12 key issues. But they also said, here's what's bothering me. Here's what keeps me up at night. Rising costs, rising crime, education, border security, Putin in Ukraine, physical security in my neighborhood. And Republicans answered that call. Democrats went out there and pointed their fingers, scolding and scaring Americans and saying, democracy's not valid. Don't let them in. So
But but I think people look, I think some of these pollsters, it's very difficult to even know what their methodology is. It's like some secret sauce they keep under wraps. And I did. I never found and I said this publicly many times. We did not have a hard time getting the Trump voter to answer a polls because you know what? People want to talk. They want to be heard. They want to contribute to the conversation. Yeah, I thought that was overblown.
Yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, because the conventional wisdom was these people don't want to talk to people. They won't answer their phone and they're going to not provide good and accurate data. But that's interesting that you'd find that differently, but you're also more successful at it.
You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Kellyanne Conway right after this. This is Jimmy Fallon inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at foxacrossamerica.com.
Let me go back because, you know, you wrote this book, a memoir, right? Here's the deal. But I want to go back because you got to the highest echelon. A lot of people want to be you. A lot of people want to do what you do. A lot of people want to. But you, you know, rose to the top of the food chain and there's a reason why. So let's go back to little, little Kellyanne. Let's go back to tell us more about Kellyanne.
where you were born, what life was like, what family life was like. Walk us kind of through grade school, high school, because, I mean, you're a fascinating personality. You can get out and articulate what you want to say, which not everybody can do. So go back to those way back days and start with kind of here's where I was born.
Sure. Well, thank you, Jason. And I do talk about this in the opening pages of my memoir, Here's the Deal. My opening line is, by every imaginable metric, I should have been a Democrat and a liberal and a feminist and probably a victim-hater, too. Because here I was.
In a very unconventional household, Jason Chaffetz with my mom, her mom, and two of my mom's unmarried sisters. They raised me. Even the dog inside was a girl. The dog outside was a boy. But this is the mid-70s all the way into the 80s. But they never...
We had very candid conversations about many different things. And my little home, the Stone Ranch, I grew up in a little South Jersey, the part that gives it the nickname the Garden State, roughly halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City to give people a perspective of where I grew up. Go Philadelphia Eagles. And I grew up never having a single political conversation that I can recall.
And I want people to know that about me because that is a very common American experience. Maybe a little less common now, but the point to that is, Jason, that like that little girl in tiny little Akko, New Jersey, rural America,
We just didn't talk about Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative. We didn't have cable news shows to have on, let alone to have them on. And the reason I tell people that is because the best way to share the center right message really is to bring that to people in your circle of life who you think aren't open to it.
People who just shrug their shoulders or say, I hate politics. But we did, you know, I was to family, faith and freedom were very important to us. We knelt for the Lord and we stood for the flag and we didn't confuse the two. I come from a long line of small business owners, emphasis, small seven days a week.
trying to do the best they could to make ends meet. I come from a family of veterans and active military and military spouses, where we believe that Ronald Reagan, I think, inspired the women in my family and the men in my family to think about the place of America in the world differently and the place of communism and socialism to wake up to what that was differently, which is why we're back to that conversation again now.
But I remember wearing a little homemade button because I was seven and ignorant. And I was mad at Richard Nixon for preempting the Price is Right and The Young and the Restless probably. I did like to watch with my grandmother that summer. There he was. They were going to have impeachment hearings with him. And so what I did was I put impeached Nixon –
homemade pins on my clothes but i'll tell you what once ronald reagan was there once i met him in 1984 he came to my hometown of hamilton new jersey blueberry capital of the world i was co-captain of the field hockey team i was a senior in high school and i had been new jersey's blueberry princess so i got to meet ronald this is what happened i got to meet him it was a very quick little polaroid picture but i was smitten and bitten jason i was just not enough i just missed the ability to vote for him
by a couple of months, but I was taken. And look, the female vice presidential candidate that year was Geraldine Ferraro. She was just like the women who had raised me, Catholic, Italian woman, tough talking, you know, matriarch. But I listened to her and then I was inspired instead a week later by a man, by a person, a different gender from a different coast, four times my age. And that is the beauty of this country and of politics.
We don't fit ourselves into these neat, stupid demographic boxes that pollsters and pundits and politicians put us into. We make our own choices and we express our own voices through our vote, which is, I was raised to know it was the most important sacrosanct
secular right that you have, because it was the most equalizing factor for each and every one of us in our great democracy and constitutional republic. But I grew up lining up my dolls. I was kind of a little lonely. I was an only child, very close to my two first cousins, but I'd line up my dolls and my stuffed animals who couldn't talk back to me, and I'd have them as my jury.
Every single time in my make-believe courtroom, in my tiny little room, in my tiny little house, I'd win every single case. So people said, you have to be a lawyer. Anyway, I'm a fully recovered lawyer. I took a great job in polling with Dick Worthland, wonderful man, based in Utah, then California.
And he was Ronald Reagan's pollster. I took an $8 an hour job there. Jason, when I was a senior and going into my senior year in college and learned the craft of the knees of the master and of course left to go to law school. That's three years clerk for a judge for a year, but went right back into polling, working for Frank Luntz at his firm and went out on my own June 1st, 1995, right after Newt Gingrich and Republicans swept with a contract with America and
And I never looked back. I felt the conservative movement had had such a magnificent success in 1994, but it really didn't have a pollster. A lot of the pollsters were, I would say, a little bit more establishment, a little bit more Republican, less conservative. I was pro-life. I was pro-Second Amendment. I was for religious liberty. I had a different perspective. I felt that there was no reason we should have this political gender gap, that women in this country were also starving for the freedom message.
and that this would be a good time to start focusing on that in earnest. So, and then look, Jason, I just want people to know that Donald Trump saw something different in me. He was something different in politics. He plucked me. I was hiding in plain sight, working super hard for many years. He plucked me not at the age of 29, Jason, or even 39, but the age of 49 and made me campaign manager. And, and, you know, the rest is really history. But I think when the history books are written and people very nicely say,
Kellyanne Conway's first woman to successfully run a presidential campaign in the U.S., we have to put a comma and complete that sentence, Jason, which is, and Donald Trump put her there. No one else had done that, male or female, in these candidates. I think that he changed...
He changed the way politicians do and should listen to the larger population. He did not erect a conventional political campaign. He built a movement. People felt like they were included. So I want to go a little bit deeper in that, but let's go back to how he bumped into you and selected you and how that came about. I mean, the whole world is his oyster, right? He didn't grow up and wasn't totally 100% focused on politics, right?
You know, he's a successful businessman in New York, one of the most successful in the country, right? And had his own television shows and all that. How in the world did he kind of bump into you and select you and pick you? What was that whole experience like?
It's such a great story and I'll go through it quickly. It also is in the book, Here's the Deal. So I meet him probably socially, probably with my husband, George Conway, maybe early 2000s at something. But then I meet him
And it starts to strike up a much closer relationship with his organization when in 2006, Jason, Donald Trump runs into a problem with the condo board at the Trump World Tower where George and I are living with our twins then just turned 18, voted in their first elections, then about a year and a half old. And I was at our house in Virginia with the twins and my mom and George called me and he said, Kellyanne, we received a notice that
at the condo that there's an emergency meeting because the condo board wants to try to get trump's name off the building and make some significant changes within the building that would affect what george concluded as a smart lawyer would be would would affect the value of each unit right so he said trump is looking for people's help i'm going to go and i said well i assume we have one vote per unit not one vote per adult he said that's right so i said so he went
George Conway and a guy named Michael Cohen, yes, that one, helped Donald Trump evade this change in the condo rules. And the next day, Donald Trump called George at his law office in New York and said, George, you did a great job. Thank you so much. Sent him a handwritten letter with that famous Sharpie signature and said, thank you so much. Great, terrific. Someone else calls George that day and says, Mr. Trump would like to offer you a seat on the newly configured condo board, to which George says,
Oh, I would never do that. He's not one for listening to people's problems in the elevator, but his professional pollster focus group moderator wife would love it. So he said, I would never do that, but I bet my wife Kellyanne would. And his wife Kellyanne did. So I sit on the Trump World Tower condo board starting in 2006, never thinking I'm going to bump into him.
to Donald Trump, Jason. But sure enough, I go to my first meeting in the Trump Tower. I arrive a little early. I'm sitting there minding my business, having a cookie and a Diet Coke, looking through my tabulated binder. And I hear this famous voice booming down the hallway. And here he comes. And I was very impressed with how conversant he was with no notes.
about that building and it turns out about all of his buildings. Fast forward, he would see me on TV. He'd call me a couple of times a year just to shoot the breeze. Maybe I'd pop in there here and there to sit down and talk about politics. Donald Trump hires me in 2011 to conduct a poll for him to see if he should run against Barack Obama, who's running for reelection as president of the United States. And my poll showed that it would be an uphill climb, that Barack Obama had significant advantages
as the first African-American president, as an incumbent. And I said to Trump, I said, look, what I think is that you'll never know what people really think about you until you actually declare your candidacy because people can't even get their heads around why Donald Trump would bother doing this. He already has what motivates many people in politics. He has power and money and fame and fortune and bankability. Why would you do this?
And so my poll showed it would be a real tough climb for him against Obama. So, of course, what did Donald Trump do, Jason? He hired another pollster. And that pollster was much more rosy. He liked those results better. But I think what I accomplished in that engagement, Jason, was a guy who said, here's a person who's not obsequious. Kellyanne told me what I need to know, not what I wanted to hear.
And he filed that away and we kept in touch. And then he made me an offer early on in 2015, I'd say March or so in 2015 to join his campaign, which he announced a couple months later. And I said, no, I said no, because I thought, I don't think he, I don't know that he's ever going to do any polling. He'll probably just rely on them on the, on the national polls and the public polls. And then I said the same male consultancy that's always tried to exclude me for many years.
We'll just say, oh, Kelly is just flying around with him on his plane and just, you know, sending out his tweets or this, that and the other. And I also had four very young children. So I had to make a decision about which campaign I go to presidentially. And I it was going to be Donald Trump's based in Manhattan or Ted Cruz's super PAC with the Mercer's also based in Manhattan. I went with the super PAC.
But Trump and I always kept in touch. And as soon as he became the nominee, I went over to that campaign and then he elevated me. I was already one of the pollsters on the campaign senior advisor, but he called me into his office, asked me to stay after this big meeting and was in a fit of peak in early August 2016. I said, what's going on? I said, you're running against the most miserable candidate.
Sour, dour candidate. I said, and we're starting to look like her. No, I'm not. And I said, there it is. I said, what's going on? And he said, well, I'm told that I'm better candidate than Hillary. I said, honestly, fact check true. Empirically you are, but that she's got the best people. I said, no, she has the most people. They're loaded up over there in Brooklyn. We're the underdog, understaffed, under resourced, underestimated campaign. You know, it's scrappy. It's hungry. And he said, well,
what do you think? And I said, well, of course you could still win. I said, but the polls, the other polls, I said, you know what, Mr. Trump, I don't know a billion things about a billion things, but I know consumers, I know voters and the window is starting to close, but you can still do this as I see it. If you do three things, you can win. He said, what are they? And I went through them. I'll do them very quickly. If you want Jason, I said, no, you got it. Cause by the way, it's directional for the future. Yeah. And this was,
Not done in 2020, Jason. And I'm very critical in my book of the Trump-Pence 2020 reelection campaign. I'm critical because it broke my heart. I think they should have won overwhelmingly and outright. It should have been Reagan 84 at some level. And we would not have Joe Biden in the White House. We would not have January 6th. We would not have all this nonsense between November 6th and January 6th that was happening in the White House, sadly. And so I'm very critical of it because with $1.4 billion and your opponent is Joe Biden and he's in his basement-
And you're Donald Trump with this list of accomplishments and you're out there at rallies and you're surging supplies and money and doing what you can for COVID. I think the $1.4 billion in the Trump reelection campaign in 2020, Jason Chaffetz proved the old adage to be true that the fastest way to make a small fortune is to have a very large one to waste most of it. So in 2016, I told him, I said, Mr. Trump, number one, this election is mostly about you.
I said, it needs to be more about her. He said, oh, I know I get the best press coverage. I said, well, you certainly get the most press coverage. Right. Yes. I said, if you can agree to make it more about her, people aren't going to go into the ballot box and the choices are Trump, not Trump. It's going to say Hillary Clinton. And you have to swallow a lot of what you feel and think about this woman.
to vote for her. People already don't think she's trustworthy or honest. All the polls said that. He said, okay, do that. And I have to give him credit, Jason, because it's hard for a successful businessman, one of the most famous in the world, who also at the time, you know,
had all the coverage to himself. The cameras were following him. CNN would leave the open podium waiting for him to take to it. So I give him credit for being willing to share the press coverage. Number two, and more importantly, I said, let's focus. I said, listen, you've already blown to smithereens this ridiculous word electability. I hate the word electability, Jason, because I think it sucks the lifeblood. Who can win? Who can't win? You can win. I can't win. That's overthinking it. Yeah, yes.
And, you know, it sucks the lifeblood. I'm sure you were told at some point, it's not your time. Don't run. You can't win. There's somebody else we're thinking of. It sucks the lifeblood out of people who don't have the deep pockets and the high name ID, who are usually the conservative candidates who want to challenge the establishment. So I told him, I said, Mr. Trump,
You already blew to smithereens and disproved this ridiculous fallacy of electability by beating 17 otherwise great men and women well qualified to be the Republican nominee. So just keep going. Don't listen to you can't win. You're a joke. She, you know, Hillary's got it all wrapped up.
Barack Obama as Senator heard that eight years ago. She's got it all wrapped up. Don't even bother. What a joke. Your time will come. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Your time will come. So I said, let's keep doing that. Instead, electability pretends that I know if you will or won't win before votes are cast.
Electoral college is how you do or don't win. So that was number two. Number three, let's do it. Let's focus on those 10 or 12 states that Obama carried twice with over 50% of the vote, where Hillary is not over 50% in any credible polling and staying there. And most important piece,
where the electorate in each of the states went for a Republican during the Obama era statewide for governor and or senator. So Jason, we're not talking about Oregon or Washington state. We're talking about Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida. And we're also talking about states we didn't end up winning like Colorado, New Mexico and New Hampshire. But we're talking about it. So to me, it was such a simple way of looking at
And he said, okay, let's do it. And I said, well, who do I have to talk to? He looked around, he looked out the window of his famous, you know, 26. Honey, you're talking to me. Yes, everybody does call me honey. And I've called far worse. So I'll take it. And so, you know, the rest is history, but I give him credit, Jason, for at least taking those risks for trying something new. I don't think, in fact, I think you and I know that
Somebody who wasn't somebody not in politics at some level, somebody who had been a businessman making those kinds of decisions would not have had the courage to do something a little bit different. Yeah. No, there's a traditional route. Nobody wants to get out of their lane and, you know, just go with the same old, same old. But I mean, just listening to you talk through the thought process and the analysis of it.
It's very clear why you became the campaign manager. For those of you that want to hear, see, understand more, the book that she wrote is Here's the Deal. What else are we going to hear or see, I should say, in this book? Did you do an audio book? I don't know. Did you do one? I did. And it's all my voice, Jason. I insisted on being my voice in even the public. It's hard to do. But yeah, I'm glad you did that. All right.
So, but what else are we- So it's the audio book also you can download. I'm sure the book's on sale now too because it hit the New York Times bestseller list six months ago. So it gets discounted after that. Great stocking stuffer folks. Great, I'm going to be a shameless promoter. Great stocking stuffer. No, it is. If you've got somebody who's involved in engagement politics, I get asked all the time by some young people,
who say, gosh, you know, I really want to get involved. I really want to run for office. And usually I tell them if they're pretty young, I say, well, the most important thing you can do is not run. Don't do anything. I'm like, go out and have some outside experience that you then can bring to the table. Then you're going to be a much more, then you'll have some, some real life experience to lean into and be able to bring that to, to the table. But, but
If you want to actually read about somebody who's done it from start to finish, the book is Here's the Deal. And there's a reason why it's been so wildly successful. And it's because you've been wildly successful. What else are you going to see or hear in this book along the way?
Sure. And by the way, the book is my memoir. It's one young girl and then woman's journey, which is circuitous, elaborate and unlikely and could happen to anyone. The true American dream story. But it's also a book for everyone, Jason. I do go through some of the more granular data. I go through some of the more the changes that are just happening to our country demographically that we politically must respond to and accommodate, be respectful of. And the entire afterward is extra lengthy.
because I want it to be directional for the future. How do...
win, how to approach things. I also talk in there, Jason, at the end about how many people in our circle of life don't want to wear their red and blue uniforms 24-7, 365, but they do want to feel, as you just said, they want to feel engaged and not constantly enraged. They want to feel like they can participate. And they say, what's the best way for me to talk to the neighbor with the crazy signs in the electric car? And the little niece who came for Thanksgiving is coming back and
I sort of, I broached that. It's also very raw and revealing about some of the people I work with in the White House. And it's not meant to be a tell-all. I call it, it's not a tell-all and bore most.
But it is very raw and very revealing. I haven't heard it said that way, but that's a good way of saying it. Yes. How all and foremost. So many of them do that. And, you know, it's also it's also one of the it also is very revealing about Donald Trump and Mike Pence. You know, I'm a unicorn of sorts.
Jason, I speak regularly to this moment to Donald Trump, to Mike Pence, to Mike Pompeo. We have great leaders in our party who worked at the top echelons of our United States government, who are among the most powerful people in the world for those four years. And I feel privileged to call them friend and mentor and feel that each of them has a continuing obligation to and a voice on behalf of this great country and this world that's truly suffering and bleeding out in some ways.
So Jason, I also talk about what it was like to have my husband, George Conway, my husband of...
since 2001, my partner in life since 1999, to change his mind about Donald Trump and by extension me and how that really took a toll on my family, my children, and how I tried it not, I tried to be a total professional. I tried to bite my tongue and my lip when the media thought it was their business. The media, as I described, and Jason Chaffetz of, you know, these troubled, thin-skinned, terrified people living in glass houses thought that it was any of their business.
And that, you know, in the end, they just made George whatever they needed him to be. Now he's a constitutional scholar over here. He's a political campaign manager genius. Oh, wait a second. He's a he's an armchair psychologist reading the DSM and writing about
about donald trump's mental state over here as a tweeter and i really just needed him to be my husband and the kid's father the way it always been and and my person you know brilliant lawyer and i just want people to know the facts that on election night 2016 at the new york hilton at 2 30 a.m when uma abedin called my cell phone i had the screenshot of that in my book when she called with secretary clinton on the line to congratulate donald trump and i handed him the phone i literally said shut up everyone and everybody looked at me like how rude and i said
I said, I've got Secretary Clinton on the phone. Congratulations, Mr. President-elect. And I handed him my phone and I turned to Mike Pence and I said, Jason, I said to Mike Pence, make sure she, Hillary, actually concedes. Wow. Was that profound? And we're still waiting. And so we go out there and my husband, George Conway, is crying.
in his black MAGA hat. She did it. She did it. They won. She did it. My wife, she did it. And he was so proud of me. He was so happy for Trump, whom he had supported. And look, Jason, this is America. We have free thoughts and free will. We are welcome to change our minds. We are.
But the way it was done so publicly and so emphatically and so viciously sometimes against Donald Trump, it's just not the way it was. It's not the George I knew and loved. And so and I talk about how Donald and Melania Trump really stuck by me.
He was a great girl boss. I want people to know what a great boss he was, particularly for the women and the working women in that White House, the working moms in the White House. Jason, I have in my book a story where I'm looking up on a random Tuesday at 8.20 a.m. and I'm taking notes in an 8 o'clock meeting. We're in the Roosevelt Room and I look up and I happen to see around me four other women
Ivanka Trump, Brooke Rollins, Mercedes Schlapp, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And I take notes in the margin. I write down all of our kids' names. These are my friends and my coworkers. Each of us, all five women, have the top position that you can have in the West Wing, assistant to the president. And among, including all five of us,
Together, we have 19 children. At the time, Jason, ages two to 16. You're not gonna find another workplace anywhere where those five women can have the highest rank, work together collaboratively, be there at 8:20 in the morning with all the kids, all the limbs attached, all the backpacks packed, kids fed and watered for the day.
And I really credit Donald Trump for creating an environment where we felt valued and respected and listened to. And I talk about a couple of examples where the president and I disagreed on variantly on something on a public. He really did like that, though, didn't he? He was OK with it. Yeah, he loves it. He expects it. You know what? Not only does he accept disagreement and dissent, he expects it.
One of the dumbest things ever said about Donald Trump, and there are more than a few, is that he only wants yes men and yes women around him. He abhors obsequiousness because, as you know, you're a leader. You're a member of Congress, a chairman of committees. You know that you need the truth. You need the facts. You need to know what's happening or else you cannot do your job ably.
And, and frankly, affably. And so, and so I guess I would disagree with him, but privately and respectfully. Right. And I hope, I only hope that Joe Biden has people around him and who does that. I don't, it's not even clear to me. People tell him what's going on most of the time. Yeah. I, yeah, I, we could go off on the, on that, but the work ethic of Donald Trump, I mean, second to none, I have never in my life seen or heard more stories of,
about somebody who works as hard and cares as much. And one time I got to go in there and I have a handful of experiences with the president, but I walked in there. I said, Mr. President, I have seven things you've never heard before. And he's like, perfect, let's go. Number one. And so we started to go down the list. Every single one of those things he knew something about. Like I knew nobody had talked to him about the postmaster.
And I said, I need to talk to you about the postmaster. He said, well, she is, you know, and I was like flabbergasted. I had no idea that he knew who she was. I mean, he'd only been in office for a little while. You don't ever have the postmaster brought up on the campaign trail, right? Nobody ever asks you, never has a comment or a question about it. But we had a real problem and a challenge there.
And, but he knew exactly who she was. And I was just, I was like, I had a real smile on my face thinking he really does. It's amazing the wealth of knowledge that he had. And he doesn't forget. And Jason, by the way, the country owes you a debt. Thank you for doing that. Because I know you were there at the beginning of his presidency and then you left Congress voluntarily and you've been a, you know, continued to be such an important, clear voice and on Fox News and elsewhere ever since. And I just, we should all,
Thank you. Praise you for going in and investing in what I call the non-sexy parts of the government. In other words, it's a huge labyrinth. People just think, well, it's just true. I mean, people just think you're out there to do press conferences or, you know, go to that. We're all there to do, you know, go to state dinners, as it were, since that's in the news right now, or Christmas parties or, you know, whatever.
seat the cabinet or Supreme Court, there's so much that goes on in the federal government, including what you mentioned. And look how important that ended up being. Who would have thought, Jason, that as you're talking to President Donald Trump about the postmaster, fast forward, we live in a time of mail-in ballots now. We live in a time where people are really trying to suss out and understand that
Just who's voting in which methods for how long does my vote count when I put it in that box? So and obviously the whole Louis DeJoy and him staying on during Biden administration. Thank you for doing that. But what you just described in Donald Trump.
I'm glad that you have experienced that up close and personal a number of times by now, because people should know that he absorbs information. The man does not forget things. No. He never forgets people. Even things I wanted him to forget, Jason, he would not forget. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more right after this.
The book is Here's the Deal by Kellyanne Conway. It's like perfect for anybody in the holidays or birthdays or whatever. It's their Father's Day, but that's down the road. But right upon us is Christmas and Hanukkah and everything else. And you want to actually...
hear from somebody who really truly was in the room, not out on the periphery somewhere. This book, I Kelly and you've been very generous through your time. I do have a few more questions for you that I have to add. It's a rapid fire question. So I, you know, no matter how many polls you've taken in your life or conducted in your life, I got to ask you these. Okay. You got it. All right. First concert you attended.
Oh, Bruce Springsteen, the summer of July 1980. I was 13 years old, clear in Philadelphia. I think it was called the Spectrum at the time where the Flyers played. And of course, we went with Rona Ruberton's daddy was a chaperone. Yep. Nice. Nice. What was your high school mascot? The Wildcats, St. Joe Wildcats. Nobody's tried to cancel it yet. And which is good.
Yep, St. Joe, Hamilton, New Jersey. I went to the same school, Jason, St. Joseph Wildcats from kindergarten, which was in the basement of the convent, all the way through 12th grade. Same place, 13 years. Wow, that's impressive. Not everybody can say they've done that. What was your very first job? Not...
your mom or dad saying hey you know take out the garbage i'm talking about working for somebody else yes so my aunt and uncle had a roadside stand called the country farm market after my uncle lost his job at the local brewery uh which is uncle and they had to figure it out they opened up a roadside stand where they sell fruits and vegetables and christmas trees and they let me make the signs and sweep the floors when i was 10 and 11 and then my and then my first real job
outside of the family was at Indian Farms, Indian Brand Farms, where I packed blueberries for eight summers beginning. Well, that's how you became, what was it, Miss Blueberry? Blueberry Princess, that's right. The Blueberry Princess.
But I was also the world champion blueberry packer because I was the fastest. They really did have a competition for that. And I worked there for eight years from the age of 12 to 15. And Jason, I tell everybody and I write in my book that everything I learned
about collaboration, being prompt, consensus building, teamwork, hard work, honest days, wages for an honest day's work. I really learned in that blueberry farm and I encourage young kids, including me, I have four teenagers now that you've got to go and work, get an internship or go and work for money where you have to show up. And none of this online stuff, Jason, I want these young kids to figure out,
you know what it is to wake up get yourself somewhere put that clean shirt on smile be prompt be pleasant be prepared and i learned a lot of that on the blueberry farm it's amazing how much you do learn and then you retain through the rest of your life on life lessons and perspectives and everything else it is it's it's such an important thing what's the kellyanne's like superpower what can you do better than like you know everybody has sort of a superpower like hey i'm really good at this
My superpower is, and I want to say multitasking, but I think being peripatetic with life's
of necessities, meaning I can sort of balance out the kids' schedules, my work schedule, try to cram in a 20-minute workout over here, take care of the elders, my mom and her two sisters who are in their 80s over here. And I do it. And there's a satisfaction in being able to accomplish many different things at once. So long, Jason, I have to say this very soberly, so long as
you're giving 100% of yourself to each. I think that working women particularly can feel like nobody's getting 100% of them. Ladies, they are. I promise you they are. I think it's sad, but also I'd say my real superpower, because my real superpower when I was younger, and I want to pass this on to young people listening, is learning to accept and hear the word no more often than I said it. Particularly when you're young and just starting out, Jason, you have to realize you will be rejected
You will be heartbroken in a relationship. You won't get that seat in the college or the grad school or the promotion or the job that you earned, that you really could, you wanted so badly you can taste it. You will be rejected. You will lose a race here and there, right? And so-
Dust yourself off, learn to accept the word no and carry on, but stop saying the word no. Make yourself available, take risks, make big moves, even if they're small moves. Be bold, don't be afraid to fall or to fail. And I think that's always been my superpower that I hold my head high, even in my failures and my losses and my shortcomings. And I think more recently, the criticism, the naysayers, the meanness. And then my other superpower in life, I would just have to say is,
I collect friends. I think I have every friend I ever made and I try to keep in touch with all of them. And it's just a great thing because the people who loved you first will love you most. And that of course begins with our family, but it also begins with friends who we consider family. And all through your life where you'll make new friends and new relationships and new experiences, Jason, my life lesson and my superpower is truly keeping those
closest to me, close to me and always making the time, not letting it go to voicemail, not looking the other way, not being too busy.
It takes, honestly, it takes two minutes to make someone's day. And it's, I don't know if it's a superpower, but it is, it is. No, but it's a, it's a common denominator. I think in the, the, the ultra, ultra successful somehow, some way they do have the time and you feel like they're a hundred percent focused on you. And it, it may not be the hour that you want, but those four minutes or five minutes, it's like, wow, they really do care. They are focused. They do understand. And they're hearing me.
And you want to be around happy people, right? I mean, that's how life's too short. You want to be around happy people. And I find you to be one of those happy people. All right. Let me keep going here. Pineapple and pizza. Yes or no?
Never. Are you kidding me? I don't even understand it. And listen, I'm the condiment queen. I layer everything on. I have never had a naked burger in my life. That sucker is just jam-packed with stuff. Except there's one food in the entire world I do not eat. Mayonnaise. It's what? Mayonnaise. I literally have had everything from elk to every kind of fish. I've tried everything in the world. What's your beef with mayonnaise? Other than it's really bad for you.
Well, no, it's not that I eat a lot of things that are bad for me. Um, no, it's not that it's, it's that I like all the ingredients in mayonnaise, Jason. I like eggs. I like oil, but why are they together? Uh, there's just something about, I used to eat mayonnaise sandwiches when I was a kid. So, you know, people do, people do. It's just for some reason is the one. And if you, if you, if you quiz anybody close to me, they will 100% get that correct. My kids will be beats in mayonnaise, but I've come to like beats anyway. I am. So for me, uh,
I'm the condiment queen, but there's something about fruit on my pizza that just doesn't sell. Amen. All right. I'm surprised how many people we do on this podcast get that answer wrong. But just a couple more real quick. If you could invite one person over for dinner and say, hey, you know what, honey? Guess what? Kids gather around because we got a special guest coming over. Anybody dead or alive throughout history. Who would that person be that you'd want to come and have and break bread with?
Well, dead or alive. For me, it would have to be Jesus Christ, my Savior and Lord, because we get nourishment from Him through the Scriptures, through what's been passed down to us. But I think we can all use...
a lot more humility and the kind of, frankly, the kind of life lessons that he provided. He would not be allowed to perform a miracle because my kids don't need that. God bless him. But I think it would be, yes, I would like that. It'd have to be Jesus Christ. Great answer. Great answer. Best advice you ever got? Best advice I ever got was that you can come home. That the old saying, you can never return home, you can never get, that's just not true. Best advice I ever got
Was my grandmother just saying, you know, and she was my favorite person in the whole world. My maternal grandmother, God rest her soul, Antoinette Lombardo, Dean Italian, I think made it to the sixth or ninth grade, but filled with wisdom. And she said to me when I went to college and then again, when I went to law school and again, when I went back to Washington to start my business, she always said the same thing to me.
which is, this is your home. This is your family. This is your refuge. This is where you will always be and belong. This is where you will always be and always belong. And it's great advice because it allowed me, Jason, to branch out. It allowed me to take those risks, allowed me to
to try something new and to experience things and maybe not even smart risks or smart engagements in business or relationships because I always knew that there was a place for me called home that I can return to. And it didn't mean I had failed. It didn't mean I was ashamed. It didn't mean I came up short.
It meant that I kept the perspective of we all need to know where you come from. And let me just say, that's the best advice I've gotten. It seems like very simple pedestrian advice, but it's life-lasting. It's lifelong advice in this way too. Ladies and gentlemen, there are people out there right now who don't want to know your name. They don't want you to have a name. They don't want to know your background. They want to call you names. They want to call you racist, sexist, xenophobe.
Because it's easier to call your name than to know your name, to know your heart, to know your family, to know your background, to learn who you really are. It's just easier to do that. And I think my grandmother's advice, it was her way of also saying, without saying, I
This is who you are. This is who you will always be and always belong. And also to protect it, to protect and progress. The only two things that each and every one of us is born with, our name and our family. We're not even born with clothes. We're born with our name and our family. And it's up to each of us, Jason, to protect and progress that.
and prosper that. No, great advice. Great advice. Uh, the book is here's the deal. Uh, Kellyanne Conway, the memoir that she wrote and with some fascinating experiences all along, uh, all along the way. Um, I thank you. You're so generous with your time and a happy warrior and, uh,
know this business and understand, I think, a perspective of the world that most have not yet caught on to. So thank you so much for joining us today. I do appreciate it. Jason, you made it fun. And thank you for having me. God bless you and your listeners and happy holidays. Merry Christmas to everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. I can't thank Kellyanne enough. She is so nice to spend the time and kind of tell those stories. And that was a lot of fun.
Want to remind everybody, I need you to subscribe to this podcast. Need you to rate this podcast. Really appreciate if you do this. And I also want to remind you that you can listen to ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad free on the Amazon Music app.
I also would encourage you to go over to the Fox News Podcast Network over at foxnewspodcast.com. Lots of good podcasts coming out of Fox. You might want to have a look at those. Some of my friends over there, Ben Dominich and Will Kane and Trey Gowdy. There's a lot of good stuff out there. Love for you to look at that as well. And thank you so much for joining us. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.
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