President Trump won’t campaign for tarnished Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore — but he sure wants him to get elected, one of his top advisers said Monday.
Kellyanne Conway trashed Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, arguing that despite multiple accusations of sexual assault and harassment, Moore would be a reliable vote for Trump’s corporate tax cuts and ObamaCare repeal.
“Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled. He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime. Weak on borders. He is strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners,” Conway told Fox News.
“Doug Jones is a doctrinaire liberal, which is why he is not saying anything and why the media are trying to boost him.”
Team Trump has said little about sexual misconduct allegations lodged against Moore — a self-professed evangelical Christian — by women who said he harassed or assaulted them when they were teens and he was in his 30s.
And Trump, in particular, has been conspicuously silent, sticking to a 10-day-old White House statement that he should step aside “if” the allegations were proven to be true.
And Conway made it clear that Trump was not likely to change his stance before the Dec. 12 contest to fill the Cotton State Senate seat held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The administration, she said, wants “the votes in the Senate” to pass the president’s tax cuts and other measures.
And she slammed Jones as a “doctrinaire liberal” who will vote against Trump’s policies.
Like the president, Moore has denied all of the allegations against him, saying they were cooked up by an unlikely alliance of liberal Democrats, establishment Republicans and the media.
While Democrats and leading Republicans have called him unfit to serve in the Senate, conservative Christian pastors and preachers have rallied behind him — and Trump has said the people of Alabama should decide if he’s fit for office.
Asked if she were suggesting that Alabamans vote for Moore, Conway said that “we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.”
She also accused the media and Democrats of hypocrisy, claiming that both had gone easy on Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who was accused of pressuring broadcaster Leeann Tweeden into kissing him and groping her while she was asleep during a 2006 USO tour.
“If the media were really concerned about all of these allegations and if that’s what this is truly about, and the Democrats, Al Franken would be on the ash heap of bygone half-funny comedians. He wouldn’t be here on Capitol Hill. He still has his job,” she said.
Democrats, Republicans and the mainstream media have all given the Franken story significant play — and he is the subject of a Senate ethics investigation.
“You know what? I just want everybody to know Doug Jones, nobody ever says his name and pretends he is some kind of conservative Democrat in Alabama,” Conway continued. “And he’s not.”