George Conway gives Donald Trump backhanded compliment

George Conway, a vocal critic of Donald Trump, gave the Republican presidential nominee a backhanded compliment in a social media post early Saturday morning.

Conway, an attorney who helped found the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project and more recently, the Anti-Psychopath PAC against the former president, shared a video clip of Trump speaking at his Reno, Nevada, rally Friday night on X, formerly Twitter. Conway is the former husband to Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Trump.

About 30 minutes into Trump’s speech, after declaring that “November 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America,” he paused as the crowd cheered and chanted, “USA! USA!” Moments later, he walked around the podium to grab a sign off the teleprompter.

The video segment Conway shared to X showed Trump removing the sign and returning to the podium to sarcastically say, “My teleprompter people are doing a great job. Thank God I don’t use teleprompters so much. I look at the teleprompter—it’s totally gone. I say, ‘What the hell happened?’ The sign fell on top of it.”

Along with the video, Conway wrote, “He’s so much better than any @nbcsnl cold open,” mocking Trump by suggesting his behavior is more comedic than NBC‘s sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL).

Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment via email on Saturday.

SNL begins each episode with a narrative cold open. With less than a month until the election, the show often parodies the political landscape, featuring impersonations of Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden, among others.

Actor Rob Lowe recently said the show is veering too close to reality and is less humorous because “Trump talking crazy, crazy s***, to me, is funnier than,” an impersonation of “Trump talking about what you think Trump would be talking about.”

Trump, after removing the sign at the rally, made a jab at Harris, the Democratic nominee, claiming that she used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall on Thursday, an argument many Republicans have circulated on X.

“She did a town hall using a teleprompter. You can’t do that? It’s terrible. You can’t have her as your president,” Trump said Friday.

However, the event’s moderator Enrique Acevedo denied the claim on X, writing, “The prompter displayed my introduction (in Spanish) and then it switched to a timer. Any claim to the contrary is simply untrue.” Univision is the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S.

Univision News president Daniel Coronell also denied the claim in a post on X, writing: “That’s not true. The teleprompter that displays a text written in Spanish was a support element for the town hall moderator. I can tell you this with first-hand knowledge because I was in charge of the television program.”