Kellyanne Conway is sick of seeing herself on TV all the time too

Kellyanne Conway.
(Image credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

Kellyanne Conway does not want to be on TV anymore. Once President Donald Trump's greatest advocate and defender on cable news, Conway is now fighting to get behind the curtain in the new administration. "Conway says she is trying to dramatically scale back her life in the media, to come in, as it were, from the heat and to nurture her role as one of a handful of people closest to the president," The Hollywood Reporter writes. "It's a role she defines as 'having walk-in privileges.'"

The paradox here is that the true power behind the president is invisible — or at least carefully muted. The operative's ultimate cachet is to be heard and not seen. In this quest or opportunity to make it into history, Conway, as much as the president might need her as a defender and want her as provocateur, understands she is sorely overexposed from her sometimes six shows before 9 a.m. and often as many after the workday. "Have I told you how sick I am of me?" she said in one of our text exchanges.Days after the election, she turned down the position of press secretary. When the president-elect kept pressuring her to take the job, she still was having none of it. In fact, so determined has she been to be inside — "where 95 percent of what I say to him will never be public" — she turned down any job with "communications" in the title. [The Hollywood Reporter]

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.