Campaign

Kellyanne Conway: Debate struggle shows Americans were ‘gaslit’ by Biden campaign

Kellyanne Conway slammed President Biden and his allies for his underperformance at Thursday’s presidential debate, calling it a “disgrace.”

“There is no breaking news in what we saw last night,” she said on Fox’s Hannity on Friday night. “It is an unforgivable, inexcusable disgrace that we as a nation have been gaslit.”

Conway, who served as a senior counselor to former President Trump during his first term, declared Trump the winner of the debate and suggested that focus turn to the former president’s successes.

“For all the talk today about who should replace Biden, I want to talk about the other side of the ledger: Donald Trump won that debate,” she said. 

In a flash poll conducted by CNN following the debate, more than two-thirds of viewers said Trump was the winner of the debate.

Ahead of the debate, she told Fox News that Trump takes debate prep “very seriously” from her experiences working on his election campaigns in 2016 and 2020. While Biden spent the week ahead of the debate prepping at Camp David, Trump remained on the campaign trail. 

“He takes this very seriously. But his type of debate prep is just to talk about what you see him talking about. How he’s going to reduce inflation, what he’d do at the border,” she said at the time.

Conway on Friday lauded Trump for focusing on key issues to his campaign, such as immigration and the economy. She called Trump a “very complicated man with very simple ideas,” and Biden a “simple man” with “complicated ideas that no one could follow, including him.”

“The way the two men handled each other was so disparate,” Conway said. “Donald Trump won that debate as much as Joe Biden lost it.”