On Wednesday, 17-year-old Maaike Laanstra-Corn asked Kellyanne Conway, President-Elect Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, how she can rationalize Trump’s comments about sexually assaulting women, The Hill reports.
It’s a fair question, considering that Conway is a successful, powerful woman, and the very first woman to run a Republican presidential campaign.
Laanstra-Corn’s question for Conway, at an event in D.C., referenced that 2005 Access Hollywood recording of Trump chatting with Billy Bush, ‘locker-room’ style.
“Donald Trump has negated claims that he sexually assaulted women but also admitted to a tape where he seemed to be describing sexual assault,” Laanstra-Corn said. “How do you rationalize that as a woman and also as his campaign manager?”
Conway’s answer was basically that people were tired of hearing about the topic, and that Laanstra-Corn, a teenager, was being mean by bringing it up. She said that Hillary Clinton’s failure to get a large percentage of the women’s vote (though Clinton still got more than half) was due to fatigue over the sexual assault story.
“[Hillary Clinton] should have gotten 60 or 62 percent of the female vote. And she did not,” Conway said, according to Cosmopolitan. “And part of why she did not is women tired of the same argument and the same thing that you’re presenting to me now, even though you’re trying to be personally mean about it.”
“For you to use sexual assault to try to make news here I think is unfortunate, but it also doesn’t matter because Donald Trump promised he’ll be a president of all Americans,” she concluded.
It’s not great that people who work for our new president-elect are already telling teen women that they’re too worried about sexual assault, but that’s the world we live in now. Let’s just try to support each other as women, and remember that bringing up sexual assault isn’t “being mean” or trying to “make news.” It’s trying to address a crucial problem in society that we’re far from fixing.