McKay Coppins has a short article on Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway arguing that she is less of a “Trump whisperer” who gets him to abandon habits that are unhelpful in the general election than she is a ubiquitous media spokesman for the campaign. Conway (whom I have known and liked for many years) says in the article that she is not at the campaign to “tame” Trump (“He is his own person”) but also downplays the idea that giving interviews is her main job.
When she became Trump’s campaign manager, it seemed to me that she was on air more often than people who have had that title in other campaigns. I suspect there are three reasons for that. First, she’s very good at it. Second, she fills a gap. A lot of conservative pundits on TV are hostile to Trump, and a lot of Trump supporters on TV are not especially good spokesmen (as Donald Trump Jr. has complained). Third, some of the work that managers at traditional campaigns have done probably doesn’t loom as large for her. There’s less of a ground-game or advertising strategy to oversee. Under the circumstances, then, a large media role for her makes perfect sense.