White House counselor Kellyanne Conway loves one lyric in Taylor Swift’s hit “You Need To Calm Down” but she’s not a fan of the Equality Act. Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asked Conway what she thought of Swift’s push for the VMAs audience to support passage of the act.
Said Swift upon accepting the “Video of the Year” award for “You Need To Calm Down”: “You voting for this video means that you want a world where we’re all treated equally under the law regardless who we love, regardless how we identify.”
Swift noted that at the end of the video there is a petition for people to call for passage of the “Equality Act,” legislation that would mandate equal protections for LGBTQ people under existing civil rights laws. Checking her watch, Swift said the petition now has half a million signatures “which is five times the amount that it would need to warrant a response from the White House.”
“I would love to just survey the audience if they know what that even is, what the Equality Act is and isn’t,” said Conway, reacting to the clip.
Conway continued: “I actually like the new Taylor Swift song ‘You Need To Calm Down’ I can sing it for you where she says ‘If you say it on the street that’s a knockout, if you put it in a tweet, that’s a cop-out.’ I love that. That’s basically Washington in a nutshell.”
“I think that when Hollywood and singers … go political, it sounds in the moment like it’s very popular<” added Conway. “And we have seen so many times where it backfires and it blows up. But she’s also somebody who went up against President Trump head to head in the United States Senate race in Tennessee and lost handily.”
Asked by McCallum to provide an answer for why the White House doesn’t support the legislation, Conway repeated the “poison pills” talking points.
Said Conway: “The president and the White House support equality, we don’t support pieces of legislation that have poison pills in it that can harm other people. Look at this economy. It is equally open to everyone. People have job mobility, deregulation, trying to bring peace and prosperity around the world – that’s to benefit everyone. But when something is named something it’s not always truly that and so we have to look at the legislation.”
