At the behest of her boss, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway is now one of the select White House staffers who has been granted Secret Service protection; and according to a profile feature in New York Magazine, the code name given to her by the agency that has referred to past presidents as Renegade (Obama) and Rawhide (Reagan) is… Blueberry?
Conway says that’s a code name she picked for herself, taken from when she was crowned Miss New Jersey Blueberry Princess during her time helping out on berry farms in the southern part of the Garden State. She was also named World Champion Blueberry Packer for her skills at boxing up the little fruit.
Conway admits it’s “embarrassing” to hear the burly Secret Service agents assigned to her muttering the word “blueberry” over and over. “They’re like, ‘Blueberry, horsepower, aisle four!’ I’m like, seriously?” she quipped. “Once in a while, somebody will come up to me in the aisle and they just sort of hasten their gait and say, ‘You oughtta be ashamed of yourself! You oughtta look in the mirror!’ And I’m like, ‘I’ll get right on it! Mirrors, aisle eight!’??…”
What Conway won’t laugh about is the reason why she has the security detail. Trump requested the extra protection after she received an envelope with a suspicious white substance, along with multiple death threats. “Most of them are online,” she said, “and most of them are very explicit and graphic, and they’re sometimes people who have a history of following through but for whatever reason weren’t prosecuted.”
Trump’s campaign advisor turned senior consultant has become one of the biggest targets for Trump’s opponents thanks to her polarizing statements on various news programs, the most infamous being her assertion following the inauguration that the Trump administration was providing “alternative facts.”
For more from Conway on that now ubiquitous phrase, click here.