Trump Campaign Manager Decries Name-Calling. What?

Donald Trump's latest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, sounded like she might be new to the 2016 presidential election on Tuesday during an interview on Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends. Though she's the campaign manager for the candidate who has brought mudslinging to a new and possibly unprecedented level, Conway called out Hillary Clinton's camp for "name-calling." Her remarks came in response to a recent speech in which Clinton made ties between Trump and white supremacists, along with former campaign manager for President Barack Obama David Plouffe's recent insistence that Trump is a "psychopath."

"Shame on them," Conway said, before claiming that name-calling indicates weakness on the issues. "I mean, the name-calling has reached a fever pitch and it just tells ya, they got nothing. They got no game." That actually happened.

Trump is so into name-calling that he's made up nasty nicknames for literally everyone he doesn't like so he can have a go-to insult at the ready with which to troll them on Twitter. "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "Crooked Hillary," "Goofy Elizabeth Warren." Trump said Obama founded ISIS. He tried to connect Sen. Ted Cruz's father to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated John F. Kennedy. Based on Conway's assertion of what name-calling indicates about a political candidate, it would seem that the candidate who's "got no game" is the one whose campaign she's running.

Conway said some things during her interview that merit consideration. For example, she noted that trying to diagnose someone with a mental illness is inappropriate unless you're a mental health expert, although she failed to acknowledge that Trump declared Clinton "unstable" and "unsound" at a rally just weeks ago (she even got a temporary nickname — "Unstable Hillary!").

Conway had a few decent points on Tuesday. Name-calling is cheap and shows weakness, and we shouldn't go around "diagnosing" people whom we disagree with as mentally ill. But crying foul about mean treatment from the Clinton camp is pretty absurd coming from the manager of a campaign that releases an endless stream of schoolyard insults. Trump should probably up his game if he wants to beat Crooked/Unstable Hillary in November.

Image: Bustle/Dawn Foster