Megyn Kelly clashes with Conway over Trump's remarks on women

Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s dismissive statement that her boss has made just “a couple of comments” in the last “25 years or so with respect to women,” triggered a contentious exchange with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who argued that Trump’s history of derogatory remarks about women goes much deeper.

In an interview Wednesday night on “The Kelly File,” Conway complained that Hillary Clinton has campaigned too hard on Trump’s history with women and not enough on her own vision for America. Paraphrasing the GOP candidate’s feelings after opting not to bring up Bill Clinton’s history of marital infidelities, Conway said Trump’s stance was that “it’s not nice that you’re running hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads against me, and he has a point.”


Kelly scoffed at the line, suggesting to Trump’s campaign manager that there is no expectation of niceness in presidential advertising, to which Conway replied “but the ads should be true.” The Fox News anchor responded that Clinton’s ads use Trump’s own words.

Later, the two returned to the issue of Trump’s checkered history of remarks about women. Kelly, who herself was a target of Trump’s early in the GOP primary, challenged Conway’s assertion that Clinton had cherry-picked a handful of Trump’s remarks to characterize him as disrespectful towards women.

“You raise the question about, you know, he made a couple comments over 25 years. You know that’s not true. You know he has repeatedly made comments about women, about their looks, about their size, their weight,” Kelly said. “Even in this campaign, talking about Carly Fiorina’s face, retweeting a negative picture about Heidi Cruz’s face. Criticizing Hillary Clinton and her look. And Kellyanne, this is an issue for him, is it not?”

Conway responded by again complaining that Clinton has made the issue a central focus of the campaign instead of offering answers about the Affordable Care Act and the investigation into her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. She told Kelly that “I’m just wondering why she’s spending tens of millions of dollars in negative ads and negative mail pieces and never putting together an aspirational, positive vision.”

“Because she’s killing him with women and she sees an advantage there and she’s trying to exploit it,” Kelly said. “And my question to you is whether he need to come up with a better answer than telling ‘Fox and Friends’ well, she gained a bunch of weight when she won Miss Universe and she was a real problem.”

“What I would say to that is this, that he should speak to America’s women based on the issues about which they care, prosperity and security, and he should talk about Obamacare and education and he should talk about the lies that Hillary Clinton has told over many different decades,” Conway said. “I think he should brag more about the thousands of women he has employed at the Trump Corporation over decades and the high positions that they have. They’ve been promoted, they’ve been well-compensated.”