During an appearance on Fox News,
Kellyanne Conway, an aide to President Donald Trump, criticized
singer Taylor Swift's support for the Equality Act.
The Equality Act, which cleared the
House over the summer, seeks to add protections against
discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity to
existing civil rights laws.
Swift's video for “You Need to Calm
Down” won the Video of the Year award at Monday's 2019 MTV Video
Music Awards. In accepting the award, Swift called out the White
House for failing to respond to a petition she circulated for passage
of the legislation.
“It now has half a million
signatures, which is five times the amount that it would need to
warrant a response from the White House,” Swift said as she
motioned as if she was checking a watch on her wrist.
(Related: White
House responds to Taylor Swift's Equality Act petition.)
When shown Swift's comments, Conway
responded: “I would love to ask her audience if they even know what
that is. [What] the Equality Act is and isn't.”
“She's welcome to her opinion. I can
tell you there's a lot of poison pills in it,” she added.
Conway went on to say she liked “You
Need to Calm Down” and sang a couple of lines from the song. “If
you say it on the street, that's a knockout; If you put it in a
tweet, that's a cop-out,” Conway sang. “I love that! I mean, that
basically is Washington in a nutshell,” she said.
Conway went on to say that Swift has
previously “lost” against Trump, referring to her 2018 support
for a Democratic Senate candidate from Tennessee who lost his
campaign. (Swift's pick for the House won.)
“She's also somebody who went up
against President Trump head to head in the United States Senate race
in Tennessee and lost handily. Marsha Blackburn is our United States
senator now,” she said.