New aide aims to bring Trump under control
She is already being credited as the woman who tamed Donald Trump.
Hours after Kellyanne Conway was installed as the Republican nominee’s campaign manager last week, Trump showed a startlingly different side to his pugnacious personality, expressing ‘‘regret’’ for the ‘‘personal pain’’ he had caused and vowing not to ‘‘leave any community behind’’.
Conway, 49, a mother of four and former lawyer from New Jersey who studied at Oxford, is a selfdescribed veteran ‘‘pollstress’’ who has spent a career helping Republican candidates close the ‘‘gender gap’’ with Democrats, who tend to be favoured by female voters.
No Republican presidential candidate has prevailed with female voters since 1988, and more than two-thirds of women have an ‘‘unfavourable’’ view of Trump. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, is ahead by an average of six points nationally and has even stronger leads in swing states, where her barrage of advertising appears to be paying off.
Democrats have been crowing after Trump carried out his second campaign shake-up in recent months, firing his campaign supremo Paul Manafort amid a burgeoning scandal over a Ukrainian ‘‘black ledger’’ that showed $12.7 million had been earmarked for him before 2012 by the country’s Russia-aligned Party of Regions.
Conway, who once won the New Jersey Blueberry Princess beauty pageant, is optimistic about Trump’s chances, promising to ‘‘sharpen the message’’ and ‘‘win the argument every day’’ while preserving Trump’s ‘‘authenticity that you simply can’t buy’’.
She concedes Trump is losing but insists there is plenty of time to turn things around before the vote on November 8.
‘‘I think it helps us to be a little bit behind, and we are,’’ she said. ‘‘It lights a fire under us and reminds us what we need to do to get this done.’’
Conway first met Trump a decade ago when she was a tenant in Trump World Tower in Manhattan and served on its condominium board. She advised his confidant, Newt Gingrich, in the 2012 presidential campaign but during this year’s primaries was aligned with Trump’s rival Ted Cruz.
While working for Cruz, Conway helped to craft attack advertisements against Trump and worked on exposing his weaknesses with women voters.
‘‘For every woman who is attracted to Trump as the nonpolitical outsider, there are two or three women who say, ‘I don’t like bullies or gratuitous attacks that are more personal than philosophical,’ ‘‘ she said in January.
She remarked that Trump ‘‘actually built a lot of his business on the backs of the little guy’’, criticised his ‘‘vulgar’’ and ‘‘unpresidential’’ language and called for him to release his tax returns, something he has vigorously resisted.
While this has supplied plenty of fodder for Trump’s detractors, Conway’s knowledge of his vulnerabilities and work trying to exploit them could help defend him against Clinton.
Conway is respected within Republican establishment circles and there was widespread praise for Trump’s ‘‘regrets’’ speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week. Although Conway maintained that Trump’s sentiments were ‘‘all him’’, few doubted she had played a key role.
Republican leaders hope it will be Conway and not Steve Bannon, the new campaign chief executive, who is the most influential voice in Trump’s ear. A former naval officer and Goldman Sachs executive, Bannon, who used to run the hard-right Breitbart news website, is a bomb-thrower with no campaign experience who has never hidden his loathing for the Republican bosses.