Kellyanne Conway says in book Trump lost the 2020 election, but 'supplicant after sycophant after showman' tried to convince him otherwise

• Kellyanne Conway, a former senior Trump advisor, has published a new memoir, "Here's the Deal."
• In it, she says Trump lost the 2020 election and describes the frantic days around the election.

One of President Donald Trump's most loyal advisors writes in a new tell-all memoir that Trump lost the 2020 election.

Kellyanne Conway, a former senior advisor to the president and the last of his 2016 campaign managers, makes her clearest assertion yet in "Here's the Deal," which came out on Tuesday.

"Despite the mountains of money Trump had raised, his team simply failed to get the job done. A job that was doable and had a clear path, if followed," Conway writes of the 2020 election. "Rather than accepting responsibility for the loss, they played along and lent full-throated encouragement (privately, not on TV) when Trump kept insisting he won."

Her concession is notable, as the former president still baselessly claims he was victorious and the election was stolen from him, despite no evidence to support the claim. Several far-right Republican candidates running in 2022 primaries continue to reiterate Trump's false claims to voters as they appeal to the party's conservative base. Trump also used Twitter and his bully pulpit to insist that he'd won the election, which culminated in a violent attempt by his supporters to stop Congress from certifying the election results on January 6, 2021.

Conway's book covers the frenetic days surrounding the 2020 presidential election when the Trump campaign and its allies frantically attempted to deny the legitimate election of Joe Biden. A team of lawyers representing Trump spent weeks filing lawsuits to challenge the vote in states Biden won, all of which failed.

In her book, Conway also excoriates "supplicant after sycophant after showman" who "genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver."

"By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due," she writes.

In the book, Conway depicts herself as a lone voice of reason in a staff eager to please the president.

"I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time," she writes.

The book contains Conway's most explicit acknowledgement yet of Trump's loss. In December 2020 she told The 19th, "If you look at the vote totals in the Electoral College tally, it looks like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will prevail.

"We, as a nation, will move forward, because we always do."

Despite her criticism of the way Trump and his staff handled the 2020 election, Conway remains a close ally of Trump.