With Omarosa Manigault Newman gone from the White House (and telling all), who’s the top African American White House staffer left standing? Kellyanne Conway struggled with that question on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning—and the reason she struggled is that there’s no good answer.
Host Jonathan Karl disqualified Ben Carson as the answer on the grounds that he’s not a White House staffer but rather a cabinet secretary running his own agency, saying “I’m asking you about the people the president is with every day.” That was a more difficult question, but Conway was game to try:
“We have Ja’Ron, who’s done a fabulous job, been very involved with — he’s been very involved with Jared Kushner and President Trump on prison reform from the beginning,” Conway said. “He’s been there from the beginning. He worked with Omarosa and others of us.”
When Karl asked if the adviser in question had an office in the West Wing, Conway answered that he had an office “in the EOP, absolutely, the Executive Office of the President,” mostly housed in the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“But in the West Wing,” Karl said. “What does that say to have not a single senior adviser in the West Wing who’s African American?”
Conway said she “didn’t say that there wasn’t,” but when pressed — “Who is?” Karl asked — she failed to name anyone.
Is anyone else surprised to learn that Ja’Ron actually exists and is not just a black-sounding name Conway made up on the spot? Ja’Ron Smith is special assistant to the president for domestic policy, but it may be something of a stretch to say that “he’s been very involved with Jared Kushner and President Trump on prison reform from the beginning.” On a podcast recorded last year:
“I’m walking through the East Wing and I run into the president,” he recounted. “We talked to each other. It was cool. It’s surreal and it definitely never gets old.”
If you’re “very involved” with your boss on prison reform from the very beginning, your big time-with-the-boss story probably isn’t running into him in the hallway.
White House legislative director Marc Short also came up empty on naming a senior African American staffer with a West Wing office—he named Mike Pence’s former domestic policy director.
