When it comes to settling scores, Kellyanne Conway is just as adept as her erstwhile boss Donald Trump. After four tumultuous years as a senior counsellor of the good ship Donald, Conway bided her time when she left the White House in 2020. The hush was never going to last, though. Now she has unleashed a broadside memoir against all who wronged her: the liberal media, the Democrats, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and — most notably — her husband, George, who after being a prominent Trump supporter fell out with the former president in spectacular fashion and launched a one-man mission to bring him down, baffling onlookers as to what on earth was going on. "Stone cold LOSER & a husband from hell" was Trump's characteristic counterpunch.
"I didn't respond at the time," Conway tells me as we mull it all over in two long phone conversations. "I didn't respond in kind when the tweeting men in my life, President Trump and George Conway, were going at it. People wondered out loud if [George and I] had a plan, some kind of plot or scheme. There was no plan. If this was all done for show, please remove me from the starring role, cancel the rest of the season and refund the audience's money. Because nobody told me this. Put your popcorn down. It's not a show, it's my life."
No one captured the spirit of the Trump era quite as perfectly as Conway. Campaign manager, senior White House counsellor, spinner without equal, purveyor of "alternative facts" (her own infamous phrase, coined about the crowd size at Trump's 2017 inauguration), the flaxen-haired New Jersey politico took her boss's pugnacious energy and casual relationship with the truth into TV studios across the land. When Trump wanted to ban immigrants from a selection of majority-Muslim countries, Conway was out there claiming that two Iraqi refugees had committed the "Bowling Green massacre", which never happened. By surviving almost a full term in the nest of vipers that was Trump's White House, Conway proved she knows how to navigate the court of King Donald. If he runs again, expect him to have her by his side.
Conway, 55, sat at the centre of the presidential soap opera, but she was also the star of perhaps the strangest subplot of the Trump era, in what was admittedly a crowded field. When Trump tussled his way to victory in 2016, Conway and her husband — a renowned conservative lawyer — were a golden couple in Trumpworld. They had an apartment in one of Trump's towers. George was talked about as a possible pick for Trump's solicitor general. But he didn't get that job, or any other in the administration. After becoming convinced that Trump was a dangerous madman, he joined the resistance as a central figure in the Lincoln Project, a much-maligned group of moderate Republicans who ganged together to try to wind Trump up and bring him down.
It began with the odd tweet but soon mushroomed into full-blown, full-time, full-throttle opposition: a barrage of Twitter threads, columns and interviews lamenting the damage Trump was doing to America. The Conway marriage became the talk of gossip-addled Washington. Was it still functioning? If so, how? By the time the Conways' daughter Claudia, then 15 years old, weighed in with a series of TikToks savaging her parents — even at one point revealing that her mother had contracted Covid-19 — the world was intrigued, bemused and a little saddened by the damage that politics, social media and the harsh light of exposure appeared to be doing to this family.
Conway is not one to let others have the last word and her book is a feast of cattiness and self-justification. "You abandoned me for Twitter," she rages at George. "And she's not even hot."
During the Trump years Conway often — and understandably — responded to speculation about her marriage with George by telling reporters it was none of their damn business. In fact when I ask her how things are between them now, she tells me the same thing. "I didn't allow Trump to affect my marriage, George did," she says. "These questions are really for him. You have to ask him if it was worth it, to change his mind. Trump didn't change, I didn't change — George changed."
In truth, though, she has plenty to say on the matter: the book is absolutely brimming with jibes at George. Conway writes about how her husband "descended into the quicksand of Twitter" and "violated our marriage vows" by making his feelings about Trump public instead of having a confidential conversation among spouses. She calls him "boorish", complains how much he "loved the attention" of the anti-Trump media and criticises his "sneaky, almost sinister" habit of going on television to attack her boss without telling her. She also thanks Trump for not firing her over the George issue, and for his son Eric Trump's "gallantry" in calling out George's "horrible" actions on Twitter.
Elsewhere Conway recalls how George became irritated with people asking for selfies with her at a baseball game. What's wrong with people wanting a picture, she responded. "They wanted to take pictures with OJ Simpson too," he replied cuttingly.
"This was getting serious," Conway writes. "And not in a good way."
Talking to Conway is like watching an extremely long ballet performance: riveting at times, boring and confusing at others. Her conversation is one of liquid movement, pivoting and pirouetting and polemicising, constantly changing the point of attack. You asked about Trump? Here's chapter and verse on Joe Biden's unfitness for the presidency. Was the 2020 election fair? Here's a long soliloquy about how she steered Trump to victory in Pennsylvania back in 2016.
One never gets a sense of engaging with a reliable narrator, but there are moments of real insight from our conversation. "We never deeply examine that which we deeply disdain," she says of the liberal media's repeated failures to understand the Trump movement. There are corny catchphrases galore: she was "bitten and smitten" the first time she heard Ronald Reagan speak. And there are flickers of sharp humour, such as the story she writes about how she asked Jeff Bezos to put her daughter Claudia on an Amazon blacklist alongside El Chapo in order to curb her prodigious shopping habits. The overall effect is dizzying and draining, not unlike listening to a long Trump speech.
Conway was born Kellyanne Fitzgerald in New Jersey; Irish on her father's side, Italian on her mother's (her maternal grandfather, Jimmy "the Brute" DiNatale, was alleged to be a Mob operative, something her mother, Diane, has denied). Her parents divorced when she was three and her father departed the scene for many years, leaving her to be raised by "four strong, self-denying Italian Catholic women" — her mother, grandmother and two aunts. She describes life at the kitchen table in Waterford Township as honest and unvarnished.
"I always wanted to be the peacemaker and the consensus builder," she says of growing up in a broken home. (Those who locked horns with her on CNN may feel rather differently about this.)
Conway has a quick mind and made her way to Washington for university and law school. She spent a year at Oxford University as an undergraduate, where she befriended the future pollster Frank Luntz and met a "rumpled but brilliant" student journalist called Boris Johnson. (What does she think of Johnson now? "I'm surprised he went so quickly, to be honest," she says, lamenting his apparent lack of fighting spirit.)
Conway came of age in the 1990s alongside other conservative female firebrands such as the far-right commentator Ann Coulter and the Fox News host Laura Ingraham. New York Magazine called them "policy babes" and credited them with sparking Washington's "sexual awakening". Conway forged a successful career working as a pollster and adviser to Republican luminaries such as the former speaker Newt Gingrich and the former vice-president Dan Quayle.
In 2001 she married the legal star George Conway after being introduced to him by Coulter. He had played a key role in the sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton brought by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee.
It was linking up with Trump that made Conway a national and then international figure. In August 2016, following the resignation of the unscrupulous Paul Manafort, Trump appointed her as the first woman to manage a Republican presidential campaign. "The world's most famous real-estate mogul had handed me the keys to the castle," she reflects in her book.
She first drew attention on the world stage in January 2017, during the imbroglio about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration. When asked about the press secretary Sean Spicer's falsehoods regarding the number in attendance, Conway said he had merely been providing "alternative facts". The phrase became an instant classic, seeming to capture the essence of Trump's post-truth populism.
She says those who bring up the phrase now, among the thousands of interviews she has done over a 30-year career as a pollster and political pundit, "just sound silly" going on about it. "I made a mistake," she acknowledges. "It was not intentional." Then comes the pivot, claiming that the media who bought into the "Russian collusion delusion" have no right to criticise her, and that the whole alternative facts furore was an attempt to bring her down because she kept "outfoxing" the anti-Trump media. "I beat them at their own game."
And so with that interview the stage was set for Trump's war with the media and Conway was his paladin, sent out daily to do battle with the outraged denizens of The New York Times and MSNBC. Even amid the Hobbesian carnage of Trump's first year in office, Conway developed a reputation for playing the game of media leaks and keeping the boss sweet with notable ruthlessness. The author Ronald Kessler called her the "No 1 leaker" in the White House, while the former Trump aide Cliff Sims claimed that her leaking to reporters about Trump was "the worst-kept secret in town".
She says these are slurs, an envy-driven attempt by White House rivals to keep her in check. "They didn't know how to stop the president from wanting to see me on TV and thinking I'm smart, so they tried to find a way to marginalise me," she says. "That was their way of trying to diminish me in front of Trump. They couldn't say I was disloyal or stupid. They couldn't say I sucked on TV — even though they do [suck]. Think of all the things I know that never leaked." One can only imagine.
So what is the secret of Conway's enduring relationship with Trump? She says she's "one of maybe a handful of people left in the US who speaks to Donald Trump regularly" and proudly quotes a recent article that said "Kellyanne occupies prime and rare real estate in the president's legacy and heart". On his side, she puts the relationship down to him respecting her as a smart truth-teller who enjoys a good brawl and doesn't suck up to him. "It has always been very candid," she says. "It's respectful to him but very forthright. Sometimes incredibly passionate — not emotional, passionate."
On her side, she says Trump's respect for women has always appealed to her — which may surprise the 24 women who have accused the former president of unwanted sexual contact or harassment. She writes that she found his infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" leaked recording "vulgar and vile", but says that didn't square with the "fun-loving, respectful man" who had been the first Republican to elevate a woman to the top spot of his presidential campaign. It wasn't Conway's reaction that Trump feared after news of the tape broke, though. "He didn't fear us," she writes. "Fear was reserved for one individual: Melania."
Contrary to the "caricature" of public perception, Conway says Trump was a "great girl boss" and that in Trump's White House mums were "respected, resourced, elevated, empowered … and I appreciated that". She juggled her job in the administration with helping to raise her four children and recalls finishing 12-hour shifts before coming home to make dinner, lend a hand with homework and attend to the domestic demands that her "unemployed" husband was ignoring. "George was polishing up his latest op-ed," she says. "He'd stepped away."
Once, after grazing herself while jogging ahead of a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, she recalls that Trump noticed she was in pain. "Are you OK," he asks. "Did you injure yourself exercising?" She responds in the affirmative. "That's why I never bother," the president says.
And yet the Conway-Trump relationship stumbles occasionally. In her book she says she told Trump he had "come up short" in his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election. He simply didn't have the evidence to prove his allegations of mass fraud. Trump wasn't too happy about this and responded to her book's publication by stating on his social network, Truth Social, that she had done no such thing, and if she had he would have told her to "go back to her crazy husband". Relations have been smoothed over since. "Despite other people's best efforts, we're fine," she says.
So does she think the 2020 election was rigged? Conway is too smart to say it was stolen outright, but too ambitious to admit that it wasn't. "I don't think it was fair," she says, pointing in particular to Covid-era rule changes in how early voting and late ballots were handled in Pennsylvania. "We'll never know everything that happened. There are lots of unanswered questions and shenanigans that make people feel uncomfortable." What exactly these shenanigans are and where the evidence for them is remains to be determined.
Will Trump run again then, to right this supposed wrong? "Yes. He wants to. He wants to announce soon." Conway says Trump has a powerful sense of "unfinished business" and believes the Biden-Harris administration is a "man-made disaster" of runaway inflation, uncontrolled immigration and international humiliation. "He's very sad and frustrated about what's happening to this country." Would she be in the thick of a third Trump campaign? "I'm sure I'll continue to be involved," she says.
Conway is also keenly aware that harping on about his stolen election won't get Trump very far. "If Donald Trump wants to be president again, he has got to look forward," she says. "People are very future-oriented." She wants to recapture the "vintage" Trump of 2015: "Having joy on the job, doing those rallies, going out and talking about the grievances of the people, the values of America, the vision of the future. That, coupled with his accomplishments in office as president, is a winning formula. Not so much looking back and talking about 2020."
She's also reading the polling that shows Republicans may be starting to tire of Trump and pay attention elsewhere — to the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom she calls "remarkable and consequential" and to the former vice-president Mike Pence, whom she respects greatly. "Whoever the Republican nominee is, I will support that person," she says.
When it comes to what she calls the "shocking" events of January 6, 2021, which saw Capitol Hill overrun by protesters, Trump is not the real culprit as far as Conway is concerned. Why not? "He believes he won," she says. Instead she heaps blame on Trump's final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who "let charlatan after charlatan after showman come before the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and peddle this stuff to the president". Trump was told he had won "so many times by so many people that he actually believes it".
Even worse than Meadows in her eyes are the people who ran the re-election campaign after Conway exited the White House in August 2020, citing family demands. Men such as Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the campaign manager Brad Parscale who failed to deliver an easy victory. "They were running against Joe Biden, they should be ashamed of themselves. Why didn't they win outright? They lost to the Loch Ness monster of the DC swamp."
Conway is a fan of Trump's "brilliant" daughter Ivanka, with whom she shared a "strong working-mom bond" as they survived in the "quicksand trenches together". But she doesn't have much time for her husband, Kushner, who played a central role in the administration. She thinks Trump should jettison him if he runs again. "He tried to get in my way personally," she says. "He didn't take the time to learn. Nobody profited more handsomely from the Trump administration than Jared Kushner. He has profited to the tune of billions, not millions. [A 2021 report by a government ethics watchdog estimated that Jared and Ivanka made up to US$640 million - more than NZ$1 billion - during their time in the White House, primarily from his property investments.] I don't think the president has profited that much. But now [Kushner] conveniently says he's out of politics."
Conway likens Kushner to her own husband, George, because both are "known first and primarily through their wives". Ouch.
Leaving politics to spend more time with one's family is the oldest excuse in the book, but by August 2020 Conway really did have some domestic fires to attend to. As well as her well-documented falling-out with her husband, her daughter Claudia decided to become a political influencer. It was time for "less drama, more mama", Conway said.
However, a fresh kind of hell broke loose when Claudia announced on TikTok that she wanted to "emancipate" herself from her parents, alleging "years of childhood trauma and abuse". When George requested that journalists refrain from contacting his 15-year-old daughter, Claudia tweeted: "You're just mad that I'm finally getting my voice heard. Sorry your marriage failed." She also posted videos of her mother yelling at her and claimed that Conway had been "physically, mentally and emotionally abusive". Now 17, she subsequently appeared on the talent show American Idol.
It's a tale to chill the marrow of any parent. But Conway says she's "very proud" of her eldest daughter, who has the attention that "so many teenage girls want, including those who are jealous of Claudia, whose moms are frankly jealous of Claudia. She is objectively beautiful and brilliant. She's charting her own destiny."
Conway lays much of the blame for Claudia's adolescent meltdown at the door of "lemming-like" and "cowardly" journalists behaving unethically by contacting her. George comes in for a kicking too, of course, for being "indifferent". Conway has also developed a powerful loathing for "seductive, addictive" social media, which has lured both her husband and daughter with its siren call. If she feels any of her own responsibility for these events, she's not about to share it with me.
Yet beyond all the spin and sass and punditry, looking past the alternative facts and grudge matches, it's clear that something in Conway ruptured painfully during the Trump years. When she's not insulting George, she is poignant about how her husband's "unconditional love and support" for her career disappeared, leaving her with a "broken heart". She is still full of admiration for his brains and success, calling him a "brilliant and highly accomplished individual whose skills I respect enormously". She won't say if the pair are fully separated, but has admitted she is "worried" about their future.
Whoever's fault it is — George's, hers, Trump's, the media's — the end result does not appear to be a happy one. "George changed," she sighs. "He seemed to enjoy the attention he was getting from people in the media who weren't particularly nice about him before that. They made him a constitutional law expert, an armchair psychiatrist, a political consultant. They wanted to make him whatever they needed him to be at that moment. I just wanted him to be the husband and father to our children that I had always known."
• Here's the Deal: A Memoir by Kellyanne Conway is published by Simon & Schuster
In her own words
"Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts"
Defending false claims about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration
"I never knew how ugly and how stupid I was until, you know, we had Twitter"
On her strained relationship with social media
"Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalised, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre"
Referencing a fictitious terrorist attack in Kentucky to justify travel and immigration bans
"My comfort level came in learning to think like a man and behave like a lady"
On being the first woman to run a Republican presidential campaign
"This is Covid-19, not Covid-1, folks, and so you would think the people charged with the World Health Organisation facts and figures would be on top of that"
Defending Trump's decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organisation
"Go buy Ivanka's stuff!"
Appearing to breach ethics guidelines by promoting Ivanka Trump's brands from the White House
"We know there are lots of leaks everywhere. There's nothing we can do about that, except not leak ourselves"
Following a leaked draft executive order that raised the prospect of reviving CIA "black site" prisons
"The problem with the commander of cheese — chief — expressing that opinion is what?"
Suffering a slip of the tongue in 2018
Written by: Josh Glancy
© The Times of London