- Trump slammed Kellyanne Conway for claiming that she told him that he lost the 2020 election.
- Conway, Trump said, can "go back to her crazy husband."
- In her book, Conway takes great care not to criticize Trump — even when it comes to his election lies.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday slammed his former top White House advisor Kellyanne Conway after she claimed in her new book that she told Trump he lost the 2020 presidential election.
"Kellyanne Conway never told me that she thought we lost the election," Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth social. "If she had I wouldn't have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband."
Conway takes great pains in "Here's The Deal" to praise Trump, often casting the pitfalls of his presidency as a failure of those around him. One of the few times she comes close to criticizing the former president is when she writes about the "sycophant[s]" who swarmed the Oval Office after the election to convince Trump that he won. To this day, Trump has never explicitly conceded defeat and continues to lie about the outcome.
"I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time," Conway writes in her memoir. "It wasn't the result I wanted. It wasn't the result some 74 million Americans — by far the largest number of people ever to vote for an incumbent president — wanted."
Conway did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Conway told Insider on Wednesday that she last spoke to Trump on Tuesday, but she wouldn't divulge the details of their conversation. She wrote that Trump was among those who pushed her to write a book.
"Write a great book, honey," he told her at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to the book. "You made history. You were the first woman. You did a fantastic job. You should talk about it."
On Thursday, Trump added, "Writing books can make people say some very strange things. I wonder why?"
Conway mostly pins the blame for the fallout of those lies, including January 6, on those around the president who couldn't deliver the hard news to him.
"The team failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting their candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due," she writes.
Conway, the first woman in American history to successfully run a presidential campaign, repeatedly tore into Brad Parscale, Trump's original 2020 campaign manager; Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and a host of other bold-face names around Trump's orbit.
As for her husband, Conway repeatedly mentions that Trump had her back. George Conway, a conservative lawyer turned Trump critic, she wrote was the one forcing her to choose between her marriage and her career.
"I had two men in my life," Conway writes. "One was my husband. One was my boss, who happened to be president of the United States. One of those men was defending me. And it wasn't George Conway. It was Donald Trump."
