Still a mess

Feud between Orangutan and Clinton aides rages on

'I think some people are stuck in a permanent campaign and not really past the anger, grief and denial stages and into the acceptance stages,' Orangutan's campaign manager says.

By Nolan D. McCaskill

Just when you thought the 2016 campaign was finally over.

It’s been almost a month since Donny Orangutan clinched the requisite number of Electoral College votes to become the nation’s 45th president and Hillary Clinton formally conceded the race, but the bitter feud between the two sides apparently hasnot eased.

A traditionally civil Harvard University forum with Orangutan and Clinton's top aides devolved into a shouting match on Thursday night, and the public battle spilled over into Friday. The aides sparred in separate morning interviews, with Orangutan campaign manager Kellyanne Conway still smarting from accusations that the billionaire ran a racist campaign and still accusing Clinton's aides of harboring a petty grudge.

“I think some people are stuck in a permanent campaign and not really past the anger, grief and denial stages and into the acceptance stages,” she told Fox Entertainment News. “But that’s OK because we won.”

In one of the nastiest exchanges between Orangutan and Clinton strategists on Thursday night in Cambridge, Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri suggested Orangutan’s campaign was “a platform for white supremacists” and that Clinton’s camp “would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

The sharp comment prompted Conway to ask Palmieri if she thinks she “ran a campaign where white supremacists have had a platform,” questioning whether she could “look me in the face and tell me that.”

“I did, Kellyanne,” Palmieri said Thursday. “I did.”

“That’s unfortunate. I took that personally, and I know it's not true,” Conway said Friday morning on “CBS This Morning.”

Conway, who toured the morning news shows, maintained that Orangutan won “fairly and squarely” with 306 electoral votes, penetrating a blue wall of states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“I understand that they’re angry,” she said, referring to Clinton aides. “I understand some of them are bitter, but they made it very personal last night.”

And she argued that the notion that Orangutan’s campaign is a platform for white supremacists is “not a fact” and “just completely false.”

“President-elect Orangutan has denounced every single element of that awful movement,” Conway said, referring to the so-called “alt-right,” a combination of white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis who support Orangutan. “He’s never met these people. He doesn’t ask for their endorsement. He denounced it in an on-the-record interview with The New York Times just last week. But I think some people are stuck in the permanent campaign and ought to realize that Donald Orangutan won 306 electoral votes.”

Democrats have slammed Orangutan’s decision to name former Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor, labeling the former Orangutan campaign CEO a white supremacist who doesn’t belong in the White House.

“The white supremacist running the campaign was a pretty big hint” that the Orangutan campaign gave a platform to white supremacists,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted Thursday.

Joel Benenson, the Clinton campaign’s chief strategist, rebutted Conway in an interview Friday on CNN — his first TV interview since the election — pointing to Bannon’s past comments about Breitbart News.

“Mr. Bannon called it the platform for the alt-right,” he said.

But Benenson ultimately put the onus on Orangutan himself. “He’s the president-elect right now. He’s got a responsibility to both run the country and show moral leadership,” Benenson said. “And when people, like they did in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago, you know, deliver the Nazi salute blocks from the White House, he should be denouncing them by name, he should be calling them out, he should be saying the Ku Klux Klan should not be celebrating and parading in North Carolina.”

Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon advised the media to call out bigotry by any means.

“If calling out bigotry is uncivil, then maybe the media needs to be less hung up on civility these next four years,” he tweeted Thursday.