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Kellyanne Conway claims Bloomberg is more sexist than Trump

AFP via Getty Images
AFP via Getty Images

White House advisor Kellyanne Conway claims sexist remarks made by Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg are "far worse" than ones made by her boss Donald Trump.

She told Fox News host Chris Wallace that the president's comments captured on an episode of Access Hollywood in 2005, in which he boasts about assaulting women, were "fully litigated" by the public with his election to the presidency one month after the tape's release in 2016.

Asked whether the president will be able to "make an issue" of Mr Bloomberg's history of sexist comments recently outlined in a Washington Post story about the litany of harassment allegations made against the billionaire former New York mayor, Ms Conway said "you don't have to wait for an election to be offended".

"The comments he's made about women, the lawsuits — that is all fair game", she said.

Given the president's own rape allegations, lawsuits and complaints about his behaviour with women, Ms Conway said: "Please, first of all, I've been working by his side for four years. He's the best boss I've ever had."

Ms Conway also attacked Mr Bloomberg for his former support for stop-and-frisk policies within his police department that racially profiled young black men and boys during his term as mayor from 2002 to 2013. On a recently released recording from 2014, Mr Bloomberg said "the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them".

In a deleted tweet sharing the recording, Mr Trump called Mr Bloomberg "a total racist". But on the 2016 campaign trail, candidate Trump voiced his support for stop and frisk and has even criticised legal challenges to the policies during his presidency. In 2018, the president told a conference of US police chiefs in Chicago that stop and frisk "works" and that his administration is working to "try to change the terrible deal" the city entered into with the American Civil Liberties Union after the organisation threatened to sue the city over indiscriminate searches that have been declared unconstitutional.

Ms Conway said the purpose of Mr Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policy was to "castigate and denigrate people of colour, and it's a disgrace".

Mr Wallace asked her why the president believed the policy was "tremendous", as he said during a debate in 2016, but racist in 2020. She pivoted back to Mr Bloomberg's comments, saying that the remarks illustrate "somebody who looks at people beneath him, differently. We can't have that."

The Washington Post published a 32-page pamphlet of sexist quotes attributed to Mr Bloomberg that he received as a "gift" in 1990. The comments depict "blunt examples of what [his employees] considered to be a hostile environment, artefacts of a workplace employees said was saturated with degrading comments", the publication said.

Mr Bloomberg, who has spent millions of dollars to campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, has faced several lawsuits alleging hostile and inappropriate work culture at his company, from berating women employees who were pregnant, including telling one woman to "kill it", and telling women in his office to "line up" and perform oral sex on a male colleague getting married. He has denied the claims.

Ms Conway criticised Democrats believing that Mr Bloomberg, a former Republican, is more "electable" among the crowded field of candidates, all of whom are white.

"Electability was the calling card for Hillary Clinton [and] Joe Biden", she said, pointing to the low polling numbers and poor performance of the former vice president in early primary states. "[Electability] means nothing if the person looks at a large constituency of your electorate, let alone this country ... Look what he said about women."

She said she "doesn't understand how the Democratic party is going to sit back and take it ... You have completely squeezed out and spat out the candidates of colour."

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