Kellyanne Conway: Trump Should Pick a Person of Color for VP and Then Pretend It Has Nothing to Do With Race

At some point in the near future, Donald Trump will likely win the Republican nomination for president and need to pick someone as his running mate. (The position is available following a disagreement between Trump and the last guy to hold the job regarding whether the vice president of the United States has the power to steal an election and Trump’s contention that refusal to do so should result in one being hanged.) Who should get the nod this time around? According to former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, her ex-boss should pick a person of color—but not in the sordid, “identity politics” way Democrats would do it.

In a deeply baffling op-ed for The New York Times, Conway—who notes that she recommended Mike Pence in May 2016 and therefore knows what she’s talking about—writes:

The most popular suggestion I’m hearing is that Mr. Trump do as Mr. Biden did four years earlier and pick a woman as his running mate. But Mr. Biden—and the country—suffers daily the consequences of embracing identity politics. [Kamala] Harris has hemorrhaged senior staff members and been largely sidelined on important issues. As someone who has seen the work and pressures inside the White House, I don’t think she takes her job seriously, and a strong majority of voters don’t think she’s doing a good job. She has not appreciably helped Mr. Biden govern and is viewed by many as an overall political liability in 2024. (Or perhaps Mr. Biden was brilliant, choosing one of only a handful of people in the country who could not upstage him.)

Having sufficiently insulted Harris, implied Biden made a catastrophic mistake when he picked her for his ticket, and blamed the blunder on the idea that Biden did not choose the best person for the job but picked a woman to appeal to women voters, Conway then makes the following suggestion:

…If I were advising Mr. Trump, I would suggest he choose a person of color as his running mate, depending on vetting of all possibilities and satisfaction of procedural issues like dual residency in Florida. Not for identity politics à la the Democrats but as an equal helping to lead an America First movement that includes more union workers, independents, first-time voters, veterans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans.

At this time, you might be wondering how it would be “identity politics” for Biden to specifically pick a woman as his running mate and not identity politics for Trump to specifically pick a person of color as his. Unfortunately, Conway does not explain this, though we can reasonably assume she’ll come up with some word-salad argument soon, on par with her infamous claim that lies out of the Trump White House were not lies but rather “alternative facts.”

Of course, it’s not hard to see why Conway would want to preemptively lay down the claim that, should Trump select a person of color as his running mate, he did so without even considering how a non-white VP could help him win the election. Last summer, a poll showed Republicans believed racism in America was worse for white people than Black people, and conservatives are currently obsessed with the idea that diversity and inclusion efforts are evil, racist, and must be stopped.