Kellyanne Conway played a key role in Donald Trump’s inner circle as the president’s senior adviser before leaving the White House in the wake of the family drama. In 2018, her lawyer husband, George Conway, began tweeting harsh criticism of Trump, calling him “a cancer” and his administration “as seen in a garbage fire” – and co-founded a super PAC already missing, the Lincoln Project. , to stop the re-election of the president. (Trump, for his part, called Conway the “husband of hell.”) Meanwhile, the couple’s teenage daughter, Claudia, one of his four children, began speaking out against Trump and confronting his parents at TikTok in 2020, at one point saying she was “driven by emancipation.” Today, Kellyanne and George, who are still married but do not live together, are “going back and forth” between their homes and their children, Conway told The Post. This week, he published a memoir, Here’s The Deal (Threshold Editions), which recounts all this and more, writing about his spouse: “I was looking at the possibility that the man who had always turned his back on me might one day stab me. me in it. ” Here, she talks to Salena Zito of The Post about, among other things, “losing my husband on Twitter.”
Kellyanne was so blinded when her husband, George, started tweeting about Trump, he thought it was false. Courtesy of Kellyanne Conway
New York Post: You have a chapter in the book “George Doesn’t Tweet” about the first time your husband, George, hit your head, the President of the United States, and how that moment really took you. surprise.
Conway: What was shocking about this retrospective tweet came shortly after [George] he took his name out of the Civil Division of Justice dispute with a statement saying, “I called the president to get my name out. I sent him all the support, it’s great to work in the administration and of course my wonderful wife “. And five days later, he tweeted. So it was all very confusing. That’s why I said, “Well, he doesn’t tweet. And he wouldn’t say that. “He was not consistent with his own actions.
Which is really annoying … I think it was like in the summer of 2018 I was telling him on Michael Isikoff’s “Skullduggery” podcast: “Oh, I knew this administration was like a show and a container fire in the April of that year “. And I said, “Really? Because then you came to Easter, then you came to Halloween, then you came to a very intimate dinner with the Kushners.”
Although they do not live together, Conway says she is still married to George, seen here in a wedding day photo. Courtesy of Kellyanne Conway
The Post: There are some pretty raw moments in the book when you confront George about his behavior by telling him he’s the only person you’ve voted for.
Conway: I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, and I don’t expect George to vote for Donald Trump; but “love, honor, and love” means just that. And this is where I felt like I was violating our marriage vows. I had a job that he supported.
[The betrayal was him] be so public about it: “I can charge you for attention.” I like to say I lost my husband on Twitter, and she’s not even sexy, she has no personality. George and I … we always took our marriage vows very seriously. We are faithful to our marriage.
I think it’s a 21st century problem, as the competition for my husband’s affection and attention was not another woman, it was a whole platform.
Conway says that although she and her husband are divided in politics, they are united to form their family. Courtesy of Kellyanne Conway
The Post: Are You Still Together?
Conway: We’re married.
The Post: How are the kids?
Conway: The kids are great. Her father and I go back and forth [between houses] … So there is always someone with them. We do this so that they can be in the schools where they want to be. [The oldest children] they wanted to finish their academic career where they started. And I can’t be that mother telling my kids, “Be your own person, chart your own path” and then tell them where to live and what to do. I tell her father, “It’s not like we’re taking kids to chemotherapy, we don’t have to complain. We can do that. “
I believe that my children have more discretion and judgment, resilience and self-control than adults [in the media] that … they were trying to treat my kids like adults.
Conway said he felt “purely terrified” after learning that Claudia’s daughter was trending on Twitter.Instagram @claudiamconway
The Post: Are you talking about journalist Taylor Lorenz, then in the New York Times, who was interviewing your 15-year-old daughter, Claudia, without her parents’ permission?
Conway: Yes.
None of this was right. There is this unspoken social construction and [the Times] he flew it by blows and clicks. And I think all of that was a demonstration, a very extreme and cruel demonstration of what had become very clear from the moment Donald Trump won: that the job of the media to get history would quickly become getting the president.
The Post: There’s a moment in the book where you describe the terror you felt when you realized that Claudia was trending on Twitter.
Conway: People wanted me to be angry with Claudia: “Take her phone, punish her.” My first and lasting feeling about all this was pure terror. I was afraid that this horrible Taylor Lorenz and other irresponsible people in the mainstream media had put a target behind my family.
She [was] 15. There’s someone here who can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t pierce their ears, or watch an R-rated movie without parental permission. And yet, [Lorenz thought] it is appropriate to contact her directly and show her in front of what each teenager wants.
George and Kelly Conway share four children. Courtesy of Kellyanne Conway
The Post: Write about how you persevered in the boys club: Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner. They seemed to be interrupting you a lot.
Conway: They did. And I had been used to abusing jealous children all my life. I was raised by these strong Italian Catholic women … But I was also used to working in Republican polls, which is a male-dominated industry.
My message to working women is … don’t do much when men exclude you. Just beat them, beat them and beat them, and everyone will notice. Finally, life is a meritocracy.
[Men] I would exclude myself from certain meetings or situations or conversations, and then voila, the president just assumed I was there and asked me for my opinion.
It was like, “Thank you for excluding me from that 20-person meeting that leaked anyway, because the president called me and asked me just before I made the decision.”
Per [Bannon, Priebus and Kushner], was security in numbers. They behaved like a political group many times. They were co-dependent on each other.
And then different factions would form. So first it was Bannon and Jared, and then Bannon got angry one day and called [Kushner’s wife] “Princess Ivanka”.
President Trump was expected and America needed a cohesive and competent team … But I think some people made it a lot harder and, let’s say, some enjoyed having authority but not responsibility.
Conway says Steve Bannon and others formed a boys club that excluded her. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Post: In the book, you never talk to the president.
Conway: I just tried it … I didn’t want to talk to the president, I wanted to try to make it better.
It’s like with George, I always think you can make it better. Honestly, he just grew up without a father. My Aunt Marie, God rest her soul, would say to me, “You would wait for your father to come and get you. it’s here and it never came. “
I finally had a love affair with my father for 40 years before he died a couple of years ago. I met him when he was 12 and we were great.
But since I was younger, I wanted to be a little pacifier, a problem solver. Don’t distract the President of the United States with pettiness.
I’m one of the few people who left [the White House] on his own terms … and he remains a part of the president’s inner circle. I’m probably one of the few people in this country who regularly talks to Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Chris Christie. These relationships are intact because they are based on mutual respect. And in my case, [I gave] a great deference to those who held royal positions of authority.
Conway said he still talks regularly with Trump and some others in his administration. AFP via Getty Images
The Post: After the president lost in 2020, you talked about how he should have listed more of his successes while campaigning.
Conway: I think the election is about the future, not the past. But … people say, “Things went better and I want to get it back.” The best thing to talk about is what [things] they were like when he was in charge. The babies had formula to eat. You can go to the gas station for $ 50, not $ 120. Supply containers were not sitting in the ocean. Putin was not in Ukraine. NATO was paying its dues. Israel was better protected. Trade agreements, manufacturing base, coal miners, energy, independent energy, all of that, all of that was better. This is a way of talking about the past.
The Post: As the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign, would you like to do it again?
Conway: My future in politics depends on …