New Donald Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway Advises Him to ‘Be Authentic’
Conway spoke to ABC News outside Trump Tower after her first day on the job.
— -- It was a whirlwind first day for Kellyanne Conway, one of the two most recent hires for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.
“Day One was amazing,” Conway, 49, told ABC News’ Tom Llamas outside Trump Tower in New York Wednesday.
Stepping into her new role as campaign manager, Conway said the advice she will give Trump is to “be authentic, because that's what Americans appreciate.”
“We see in Hillary Clinton what happens when you are inauthentic, when you are trying too hard to be something you're not,” said Conway, a strategist and pollster. “Also, I would tell him to stick to the issues because this campaign will be won on the issues and the issues that very much favors Donald Trump.”
One such issue, according to Conway, is the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”
“Hillary Clinton should be asked if she agrees with everything about ‘Obamacare,’” Conway said. “Are there pieces she would gut? Would she take us to a single payer under Bernie Sanders’ idea, for example?”
The hiring of Conway and conservative news site Breitbart’s Steve Bannon as the campaign’s new CEO follows a week in which Trump’s campaign dealt with falling poll numbers, a public battle with the family of slain Army Capt. Humayun Khan and a New York Times report on the turmoil within his campaign.
Trump has sought to put the week behind him, delivering a more in-depth foreign policy speech and making an appeal to black voters.
“I think he's having a great week, giving these back-to-back speeches on how to defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” Conway said Wednesday.
As for how she’ll be doing things differently now that she has joined the campaign, Conway said, “We are expanding plenty, and we are making sure that our ground game, our data operation and our field staff in all of these key states have exactly what they need.”
She said she plans to reach out to the field staff in key states today.
The addition of Conway and Bannon also comes around the time that previous work by Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been called into question. Manafort advised Ukraine’s then-President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who supported Russian President Vladimir Putin and was ousted in 2014.
Manafort remains with the campaign.
“I am very appreciative of the campaign that Paul Manafort and [his deputy] Rick Gates have built to this point,” Conway said. “I'm very happy that they are going to continue to help us.”