Kellyanne Conway, on the morning after a heated public argument with Hillary Clinton's campaign communications director, said she took accusations of President-elect Donald Trump's race-baiting "personally" and reacted.
"I took that personally, and I know that's not true,' Conway told "CBS This Morning" co-anchor Gayle King Friday, responding to accusations that Trump's campaign was won because of its focus on race.
Thursday night, during a Harvard University presidential forum, Conway took offense after Clinton's campaign director Jennifer Palmieri claimed Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had catered to white supremacists and had given them a platform through his ownership of Breitbart News.
"President-elect Trump has denounced every single element of that awful movement," Conway said Friday. "He's never met these people. He doesn't ask for their endorsement."
Trump's deputy campaign manager David Bossie Thursday night said Bannon is an "unbelievably brilliant strategist who is a terrific guy who has a Harvard pedigree and is getting attacked by people who have no idea who he is."
Palmieri retorted that "if providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant strategist, a brilliant tactician, I am glad to have lost. I would rather lose than win the way you guys did."
"No, you wouldn't, that's very clear today," Conway told her, during the argument that lasted for several minutes. "How exactly did [Trump] win? No, go for it, Jen, how exactly did we win? I'd like to know, because I sacrificed the last four months of my life to do it."
On Friday, Conway told CBS that the allegations that Trump's campaign gave voice to white supremacists is "just completely false, but I think some people are stuck in a permanent campaign."
Conway said that Trump won because of his message of job creation and a focus on the economy, not because of race.