Donald Trump and George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, are feuding on the internet.
Not that that’s an entirely surprising development. The two men — one the president of the United States, the other a prominent conservative attorney and husband to one of Trump’s closest aides — have not exactly been the best of friends since Trump entered the White House. On Twitter, Conway routinely subtweets the president, often referencing the multiple ongoing investigations into both Trump and the 2016 Trump campaign.
And after a weekend during which Trump raged at Fox News hosts, Saturday Night Live, and the late Sen. John McCain on Twitter, the feud flared back up. Conway tweeted that Trump’s mental state was “getting worse,” then shared the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ definitions of two conditions — narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
In response, on Tuesday Trump retweeted his 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, who argued that Trump “turned down Mr. Kellyanne Conway” — referencing George Conway by the name Trump gave him — “for a job he desperately wanted,” adding that the president “doesn’t even know him.” Trump added that Conway was “a total loser.”
On Wednesday, Trump went further, describing Conway as “VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted.”
In response to questions about the ongoing mishegas between Trump and her husband, Kellyanne Conway sided with the president, telling Politico, “you think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a non-medical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?”
“Don’t play psychiatrist any more than George should be,” she said. “You’re not a psychiatrist and he’s not, respectfully.”
The president, for his part, added during a press pool Wednesday that George Conway was a “whack job.”
The facts, as they exist, in the Conway-Trump brouhaha
So, a few things about George Conway and Donald Trump.
First and foremost, it is not entirely true that Conway wasn’t “given” a job in the Trump administration. Though he wasn’t chosen to be solicitor general, Conway was offered a senior role within the Department of Justice by the Trump administration. But as was reported at the time, he withdrew from consideration for the job, which would have had him running the Civil Division ofthe Department of Justice, in May 2017.
In a letter sent from Conway to the White House, Conway wrote that while he was “grateful” for being chosen to serve as assistant attorney general, “I have reluctantly concluded, however, that, for me and my family, this is not the right time for me to leave the private sector and take on a new role in the federal government.”
Second, whether Trump “barely knows” Conway is also highly debatable. As detailed by the Washington Post, during the early 2000s, the Conways lived in Trump World Tower, a condominium building owned and designed by Trump, and had multiple interactions with the future president.
In fact, in 2006, Trump sent George Conway a letter thanking him for his assistance in dealing with a condo board issue and “ridding Trump World Tower of some very bad people.”
But the facts — of Conway and Trump’s real relationship and of George Conway’s job status within the Trump administration — are clearly not the point here.
Why is this happening at all?
Much has been made in the media of how Trump spends his time on Twitter — what his tweets mean or don’t mean, whether his tweets should be considered in legal proceedings on the administration’s stated policies, and why the president is tweeting so much in the first place. But the question of why Trump is spending so much time tweeting about this particular issue — the inadequately Trump-supportive husband of one of his closest aides — raises a number of brand new questions.
For example, in a country in which just under a quarter of Americans use Twitter at all, why is the president of the United States spending his valuable Twitter time focused on the husband of an aide who dislikes him, in turn making George Conway a minor celebrity of sorts? The president is due to head to Ohio and Michigan this week and next to talk about manufacturing as he engages in a Twitter battle with General Motors over plant closings he promised in 2016 would never take place. Are the good people of Lordstown, Ohio, more invested in his ongoing feud with George Conway than the fate of the 1,500 jobs that could be affected with the plant’s closing? One might guess that the answer to that is “probably not.”
But in Washington, DC, home of “the swamp” that Trump promised to drain, the story of a marriage between one person who speaks on behalf of (and has been known to lie for) the president and one person who publicly calls the president’s mental health into question is riveting, like a Real Housewives episode if the Real Housewives franchise took place in the pages of the Washington Post. And perhaps even Trump can’t look away just yet.
