Conway on Trump’s 'Hamilton' feud: ‘Who is to say that he can't do that’

Donald Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said Monday that her boss’ Twitter outburst against the Broadway musical "Hamilton" is no indication that the president-elect's focus is drifting away from the work of his transition team.

Instead, Conway said, media coverage of the Manhattan billionaire’s feud with the smash hit show is proof that reporters have not learned their lesson about what truly matters to Americans.


“Why do you care?” Conway asked CNN’s Chris Cuomo during an active back-and-forth on the network’s “New Day” morning show. “In other words, who is to say that he can't do that, make a comment, spend five minutes on a tweet and making a comment and still be the president-elect?”

Trump’s Twitter beef with "Hamilton" began after Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show in New York with his daughter on Friday. Pence was met with boos when he entered the theater and, once the show concluded, a member of its cast delivered a personal message to the Indiana governor, telling him that “we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir.”

The experience set Trump off on a Twitter rant of the type that quite often churned news cycles throughout the campaign. After stubbornly refusing to apologize as a candidate for an array of controversial remarks, Trump demanded an apology from the "Hamilton" cast, which he said had “harassed” Pence by being “very rude last night to a very good man.”

Conway said Trump would continue to reach out directly to his millions of social media followers, a “great way,” she said, to reach Americans without the filter of media coverage. The former Trump campaign manager said reporters should pay less attention to the president-elect’s social media presence and more to the government he is working to form.

“I didn't say he wasn't responsible, but you're assigning malice and you're assigning wrongdoing to him where it doesn't exist,” said Conway, who noted she is taking her twins to see "Hamilton" for their birthday. “And I think we all should have learned a lesson from the election that that doesn’t fly with the voters.”