Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for Breakfast Media, was trying to ask which countries President Donald Trump was suggesting that four congresswomen — all U.S. citizens — should “go back to” Tuesday afternoon when White House counselor Kellyanne Conway sharply turned the question back on him.
“What’s your ethnicity?” she asked.
Feinberg paused, seemingly taken aback.
“Uh, why is that relevant?” he asked.
“No, no, because I’m asking you a question,” she said. “My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy.”
“Kellyanne, my ethnicity is not relevant to the question I’m asking,” he responded.
“It is because you’re asking about — he said ‘originally.’ He said ‘originally from,'” she said, refusing to answer more of his questions on the subject and saying that Trump had already sent out a plethora of tweets.
Watch the exchange here via MSNBC:
“What’s your ethnicity?” Kellyanne Conway asks a reporter when the reporter asks her about the intent of the president’s tweets.
“A lot of us are sick and tired of this country – of America coming last, to people who swore an oath of office.” pic.twitter.com/XOypuqmA4H
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 16, 2019
Conway later addressed the back and forth on Twitter:
This was meant with no disrespect.
We are all from somewhere else “originally”. I asked the question to answer the question and volunteered my own ethnicity: Italian and Irish.
Like many, I am proud of my ethnicity, love the USA & grateful to God to be an American ?? https://t.co/OvBALIO6WP
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) July 16, 2019
In comments about the ongoing fallout from Trump’s tweets earlier on Tuesday, Conway said that “we are sick and tired of many people in this country” and that the four congresswomen — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — represent the “dark underbelly” of America.
