Like Carrot Top and Gallagher before him, President Donald Trump is nothing if not a consummate prop comic. From a table full of suspicious manila envelopes to a somberly staged photograph featuring a blank piece of paper, the president seems to work best when he’s got something physical nearby to draw the audience’s attention.
This might explain why he printed out one of his very worst tweets referencing HBO’s popular rape and dragons show Game of Thrones, blew it up to “dorm room poster” size, and just left it sitting on the table during his Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
Sigh. The thing is that, despite blabbing for more than an hour during his rambling, shambolic meeting, the president didn’t make a single reference to the poster itself. No explanation, no justification, nothing. Which understandably left people pretty so curious as to what the hell it was doing there in the first place.
Enter Kellyanne Conway, the president’s resident “oops, I screwed up and gotta send someone out to fix things” adviser, who tried valiantly, and repeatedly, to explain the poster and its significance multiple times on Thursday. And boy did she fail.
First she failed with Fox News, where she was asked point blank about the poster and its message:
Here’s my abbreviated version of her response: Isn’t it great that the president talked a lot, and is annoyed with Mitt Romney, and hey how about that border security folks, and look, just ask him about the damn poster yourself, okay?
Admittedly, not the best answer to what seems like it should be a pretty straightforward question. Fortunately for Conway, she got a chance at redemption when CBS News’ Paula Reid also asked her about the poster. Specifically, she asked whether it’s a great idea to compare American sanctions to Game of Thrones’ unstoppable zombie apocalypse.
To her credit, Conway did actually mention sanctions this time... before admitting that she—and likely Trump—doesn’t actually watch the show he so prominently referenced in his tweet and poster. That makes sense, considering that the president spent a lot of time during his meeting talking about how effective walls are—something Game of Thrones spectacularly debunked more than a year ago.