Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway calls Donald Trump ‘racist’ over attacks on ‘the squad’

She’s one of Trump’s closest advisers. Her husband is one of his biggest critics. Now a blistering op-ed he wrote has put the Conways’ marriage under the spotlight.

She’s one of Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters. Her husband says the President is “racist to the core”.

The marriage of Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George Conway is in the spotlight after Mr Conway wrote a scathing op-ed about the US President.

“ … boorish, dimwitted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive …” Mr Conway, a conservative lawyer wrote in the Washington Post in response to President Trump’s recent comment that four Democratic congresswomen should “go back to where they came from”.

“No matter how much I came to dislike him,” Mr Conway continued, “I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

“But [his tweet on] Sunday left no doubt. Naivety, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president.”

Kellyanne and George Conway may have the most interesting marriage in DC. Picture: AP

Mrs Conway, perhaps anticipating a raging President Trump next time she stepped into the Oval Office — the President has previously called Mr Conway “a stone cold LOSER and husband from hell!” — was quick to voice her disagreement.

“No, I totally disagree,” Mrs Conway told Fox News about her husband of 17 years, with whom she shares four children.

Kellyanne Conway and husband George with their four children. Picture: Twitter

“But I work with this president. I know him. I know his heart. I know his actions. I know how much he has helped people of colour. And I go by what people do, not what other people say about them.”

“And also, respectfully,” she added, hinting she would prefer not to discuss her marriage in public, “I’m not going to run around pointing out everybody’s disagreements with the people in their lives. I sure could. I can point out people’s disagreements with their former spouses, their current spouses and partners, their future spouses and partners. But I won’t do that. And I would caution people … not to do that.”

It’s not uncommon for a couple to hold opposing views. But in the context of the ever-deepening moral divide in US politics, it begs the question: how much can a marriage take?

HOW THEY MET

In the late 1990s, George Conway spotted then up-and-coming pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick on the cover of a magazine, and asked his friend, right-wing media personality Ann Coulter, to introduce them, according to the Washington Post.

They married in 2001 and for a time lived in a luxury apartment building in mid-town Manhattan owned by Donald Trump, which is how they met the then real-estate tycoon.

They had four children, a set of twins named George IV and Claudia, and Charlotte, and Vanessa.

George and Kellyanne’s political views were once more aligned as lifelong Republicans, but her role as Mr Trump’s presidential campaign manager appears to have been the fork in the road.

Mrs Conway joined the campaign in mid-2016. After Mr Trump won the presidency, she paid tribute to her husband, saying, “I couldn’t have done this without him.”

TENSIONS BUILD

The Washington Post op-ed is far from the first time George Conway has publicly chastised Donald Trump. In another opinion piece in April, Mr Conway called Mr Trump a “cancer on the presidency”.

He also regularly trolls the US President. For example, there was the time he tweeted a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in reference to him. Or his merciless mocking of Mr Trump’s cringe-worthy gaffe in his Fourth of July address. His Twitter feed is almost entirely criticism of President Trump.

Twenty-five or fifty years from now, Trump’s gaffe about revolutionary-war airports may end up being the only memorable line he ever uttered in a speech. Either that, or his bit about windmills causing cancer. https://t.co/uHtMGMM8jb

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 6, 2019

In other words, he’s more outspoken and ferocious in his opposition of President Trump than you would expect from the husband of a senior member of the White House.

But that’s exactly the reason why, as Mr Conway recently told the Washington Post.

“The tweeting is just the way to get it out of the way, so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day,” he said.

“That’s basically it. Frankly, it’s so I don’t end up screaming at [Kellyanne] about it.”

US President Donald Trump sits alongside Kellyanne Conway in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, June 12, 2019. Picture: AFP

In March, The New York Times reported “George has complained to friends that Kellyanne has fallen inexplicably under the thrall of President Trump — and that he would prefer a wife who was not captured.”

Meanwhile, Mrs Conway once said to the Washington Post her husband’s tweets were “disrespectful” and “a violation of basic decency, certainly, if not marital vows.”

But Judging from the op-ed he published this week, Mr Conway has no plans to stop.

MOR E DIVIDED THAN EVER

In the three years since Mrs Conway began working for Mr Trump, the canyon between the Conways’ political views has never been wider than this week.

Mrs Conway threw herself fully behind President Trump in the wake of widespread condemnation for his racist comments. She snapped at a reporter and demanded to know his background at a press conference where she put a spin on the president’s words.

“What’s your ethnicity?” Mrs Conway questioned White House journalist Andrew Feinberg.

When Mr Feinberg asked why his ethnicity was relevant, Mrs Conway shot back:

“Because I’m asking you a question.”

This was meant with no disrespect.

We are all from somewhere else “originally”. I asked the question to answer the question and volunteered my own ethnicity: Italian and Irish.

Like many, I am proud of my ethnicity, love the USA & grateful to God to be an American 🇺🇸 https://t.co/OvBALIO6WP

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) July 16, 2019

Meanwhile, going viral was her husband’s epic Donald Trump take-down, in which he argued:

“Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to ‘go back’ to the ‘countries’ they ‘originally came from’? That’s racist to the core. It doesn’t matter what these representatives are for or against — and there’s plenty to criticise them for — it’s beyond the bounds of human decency. For anyone, not least a president.”

Mr Conway concluded the piece:

“What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.”

Still, Mrs Conway contends she can seperate the personal and the political, recently telling the Washington Post:

“I feel there’s a part of him [George] that thinks I chose Donald Trump over him. Which is ridiculous. One is my work and one is my marriage.”