The Kellyanne Conway Technique: Perfecting the Ancient Art of Delivering Half-Truths, Fake News, and Obfuscation—With a Smile

By Jarret Berenstein

The only thing Americans want to read more than Trump's tax returns.

Constantly late to work? Caught cheating on your spouse again? Can't stop tweeting unhinged rants against your political enemies at three in the morning? Then The Kellyanne Conway Technique is the book you need.

Preeminent spin expert and University of Phoenix Online alumnus, Jarret Berenstein, brings you the world's only comprehensive analysis of the tricks, distractions, and outright lies utilized daily by White House advisor Kellyanne Conway and distills her special brand of verbal jujitsu into a spin Bible for the common man.

Filled with real transcripts from the esteemed spin-ster herself, The Kellyanne Conway Technique takes the invaluable lessons from her verbal boxing matches with the mainstream media and breaks down, step by step, the mental and rhetorical aerobatics she performs as the talking piece for a president who once wrestled Vince McMahon on the WWE. From alternative facts to the Bowling Green Massacre, take lessons from Kellyanne's greatest hits.

The Kellyanne Conway Technique is the perfect guide to outsmarting the Jake Tappers in your own life: whether that is your boss, your husband, or a special hearing of the congressional oversight committee. Never again be held accountable for anything you do with a little help from Kellyanne!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Racehorse
• Release date: Aug 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781631582431

Book preview

PART I

DENY

In this section, you’ll learn all the Kellyanne brand denials and how to fully utilize them. For reference, the four main Kellyanne denials are:

1.   There’s no such thing as facts

2.   That’s not how I see it

3.   That’s not what I (he) meant

4.   Because I said so

Keep in mind that you don’t have to wait to be accused of something to start denying. Denying is something you can pull out first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It’s a little like eating vegetables or smoking weed in that you can never really do too much of it.

As Kellyanne’s lower back tattoo clearly states, You only regret the things you didn’t deny.²

CHAPTER ONE

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FACTS (UNLESS THEY HELP)

In the Kellyanne Conway school of spin, truth and fact are subjective ideas. Postmodern and existential philosophers stumbled upon this little nugget decades ago, but KC was the first person to put it to any kind of substantive use.

We don’t need to delve too deep into this, but a long time ago a bunch of scientists and philosophers (two similar but distinct varieties of nerd)³ decided that nothing can be proved to be true, just proved to be not false yet. Therefore we can never really know anything. If that sounds too complicated to understand, don’t worry. Just know that it basically means that you can deny everything and say anything.

On January 22, 2017, NBC’s Chuck Todd sat down with Kellyanne Conway to ask why the president kept insisting that the audience for his inauguration was the largest in history despite evidence to the contrary, and here is part of her response:

KC: I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or the other, there’s no way to really quantify crowds, we all know that.⁴

Right? How can you deny that this was the largest inauguration of all time when there’s no way to accurately estimate crowd sizes? You didn’t think to count everybody while they were coming in? You dingus!

And dude … what are numbers even? They’re just, like, a label we’ve put onto groups of things, you know? I mean, like, we’re all connected by the electricity of the universe, so in a way, everybody was at that inauguration, right? That means there were over seven billion people watching Trump get sworn in. Sounds like the biggest inauguration of all time to me!

To summarize: this is some good weed, and that is some dope denying.

What Kellyanne is trying to teach us here is that you can fight any fact you like by challenging its origin, its foundational data, etc. Sort of like a defense attorney would do in a double murder trial: Are you sure you saw him with the knife? How do we know he specifically said, I’ll kill you to the victim and not to, say, his phone? There are a lot of white Ford Broncos in Los Angeles, so can you really be sure that the one you saw belonged to my client?⁵

If they can get off a guy who murdered his wife and a waiter, then you should easily be able to prove that Trump’s inauguration crowd was bigger than it actually was.

Let’s take a look at the active mechanism at the heart of this denial: You can’t prove those numbers one way or the other because there is no way to really quantify crowds.

There are a wide variety of metrics that can be used to challenge the president’s assertion that his inauguration was the largest in history. Aerial photographs show substantially smaller crowds. Public transportation usage was lower for his inauguration than a typical work day. Areas that were packed for previous inaugurations were completely empty for Trump’s.

All of those methods, however, don’t work with the narrative Kellyanne Conway is trying to push, so they’re questioned and challenged at every possible juncture.

If there are facts in that narrative that can be fought, then they should be fought.

•   Aerial photographs might show substantially smaller crowds, but we don’t know what time those pictures were taken, and at what angle. Maybe there were more people there later. Maybe the photographer had a liberal bias and purposefully angled the shot to make it seem like the crowd was