MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday peppered Donald Trump’s newly-minted campaign manager with questions on everything from his choice to campaign in states where he’s ahead to his changing position on banning Muslim immigrants from the U.S., observing that much of the fallout from Trump’s campaign has been the candidate’s own doing.

Kellyanne Conway gamely sat through the marathon interview that stretched to 45 minutes, but did not seem to convince Maddow that the Republican nominee was trying to make the presidential race about “substance.”

“So much of this campaign and campaign coverage has been content-free cacophony, like no substance being discussed, and I think that's a shame for the voters,” Conway said at the start of the conversation.

“Some of the cacophony has been because your candidate has picked some unusual fights, because he has conducted himself as a candidate in a way that other campaigns haven't,” Maddow replied.

Pushing Conway for specifics on what Trump meant when he last week expressed “regrets” for causing “personal pain” to some voters, Maddow asked if the Republican nominee would apologize to the federal judge whose Mexican heritage he criticized and to the parents of a slain Muslim American soldier who he attacked.

“People should look at the full measure of each of these candidates and not always judge—well, not just judge him by one or two things that he has said here,” Conway said, telling Maddow she didn’t know if Trump had directly apologized to those two parties.

“To be fair, those things that he's getting judged for and people are not letting them go, it's because they're so unusual,” Maddow said. “I mean, for any presidential candidate, for any politician to get into a personal fight with a Gold Star family is so strange, it's so unusual. I mean, not just a political miscalculation, it's humanly shocking and I think that's why he is the only one who can ever put that to rest.”

The conversation turned to Trump’s December proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, which has since been amended to banning all people from countries “with a history of terrorism.”

“He put it in writing: a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. It was very clear. Is that now no longer operable as the statement of the Trump campaign? Should we see this new statement about countries with a history of exporting terrorism, should we see that supplanting that earlier statement?” Maddow asked.

“Well, I don’t think it supplants it at all,” Conway replied.

“So they both exist?”

“I that that—well, yes, they do, because I think it clarifies it,” Conway said.

Maddow pressed on, asking if Germany would qualify as a country with a “history of exporting terrorism” given that some of the 9/11 hijackers were living there before the attack.

Conway said that 9/11 itself was what changed terror policy, and that the campaign’s policy remains suspending immigration “from countries that are known exporters of terrorism.”

“Like Germany,” Maddow shot back. “There’s a reason why we keep not moving on from this stuff.”

The MSNBC host also grilled Conway on why Trump was spending donor money campaigning in states like Mississippi, where he is virtually guaranteed to win, or New York, where he is far behind Hillary Clinton.

Conway said she “inherited a schedule that we’re taking better control of” and that their poll numbers were slowly turning around.

“Things are starting to look a little bit better,” Conway insisted. “Battle ships turn slowly.”