According to Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump pondered pulling out of the 2016 presidential run when the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape revealed him boasting that women let him “grab ’em by the pussy.”
Conway, a former Trump campaign manager, and senior adviser made the unexpected allegation in her forthcoming memoir, Here’s the Deal, which The Daily Beast received a copy of ahead of its release on Tuesday.
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She claims that on the night of Oct. 8, 2016, she and Trump huddled around the corner from the elevator landing on the 24th floor in the privacy of Trump Tower to discuss the future of his candidacy.
Conway said that Trump had received stories that the GOP “may throw him off the ticket or hold a vote to eject him” in the wake of his “disgusting” statements, which were caught on film a decade ago.
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“Should I get out [of the race]?” Trump asked Conway, according to the book.
Conway’s account of what happened in private contrasts sharply with Trump’s public statements. On October 8, the then-candidate told The Wall Street Journal that there is “zero chance I’ll quit.”
“I never, ever give up,” he added.
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Conway stated that she wondered if Trump was testing her or if he was truly second-guessing himself at the time.
According to her, she denied the possibility of him quitting outright.
She explained to him that withdrawing from the contest at tha“I know you don’t like to lose,” she says she told Trump, “but I also know you don’t like to quit.”
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She adds gat at that point was not an option because early voting had begun.
Conway writes that Trump appeared to have doubts, asking Conway: “Will I lose? Will we lose? Can we still win?”
She then details a sequence in which she says she comforted him that he would win while simultaneously berating him for the obscene things he was caught saying on the tape. Trump previously boasted to Access Hollywood presenter Billy Bush that he doesn’t “even wait” before making a move on a lady, which prompted analogies to sexual assault at the time.
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Conway defended Trump against similar accusations at the time, telling CNN’s Dana Bash in October 2016 that people “should stop using” the term “sexual assault” to describe what Trump claimed in the audio.
However, she alleges in her new book that she confronted him and informed him his statements were “disgusting” and “reprehensible.”
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Conway’s book has been kept mainly under wraps ahead of its release, though People magazine published an excerpt last week in which she expressed her displeasure with her husband George’s incessant Twitter criticism of her employer.
“Clearly he was cheating by tweeting,” she wrote.