During her time as a senior counselor to former President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway appeared to support the president’s every move thanks to the public persona she maintained. That persona, however, may have been more fiction than fact.
In truth, according to a story by Evgenia Peretz [1] in Vanity Fair, while Conway regularly complained about stories inside the White House being continually being leaked to the press, she was one of the ones doing the leaking. And apparently, she knew how to double-deal with the best of them.
Writes Peretz:
“As a regular guest of Morning Joe, she praised Trump as ‘masterful’ and then, on one occasion, according to co-host Mika Brzezinski, took off her microphone and said ‘blech, I need to take a shower.’ Morning Joe banned Kellyanne shortly thereafter.”
Conway’s steely determination to remain on top meant there was no love lost between her and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. During the 2016 presidential campaign, when Conway was campaign manager, there was already plenty of friction between the two.
Peretz writes:
“During the campaign, Kushner already couldn’t stand that Kellyanne was taken credit for being the campaign manager, according to multiple sources. He believed she did nothing of substance, that ‘campaign manager’ was a made-up title designed to get a woman on television. On one occasion when Kellyanne was directing orders, Kushner stepped into the conversation and chastised her. ‘You’re not really the campaign manager,’ he told her. ‘Stop telling people what to do.'”
The situation between Conway, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump continued to deteriorate, and by February 2017, he and Ivanka were telling Trump at Mar-a-Lago about just how “insufferable” Conway was. One witness reported the couple wanted her out. Melania, however, felt differently and according to Peretz, “was Kellyanne’s chief ally and protector and no fan of Javanka (Jared+Ivanka).
“If it weren’t for Melania, suspects this source, Kellyanne might have been out of there in the first year,” Peretz writes.
At one point Conway was caught in real-time exchanges with journalists from The Washington Post, Politico, Bloomberg, The New York Times, and CNN on her laptop bashing Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer, “all by name.” Her text message function had been synced to her laptop and Conway was apparently unaware of this.
Ronald Kessler, author of The Trump White House was so shocked by the exchange and her mean-spirited words that he didn’t report them.
Notes Peretz:
“Today Kessler says, ‘She settles scores. It makes her more powerful to be the dispenser.”
But another source who knows Conway doesn’t see her that way and rationalizes “if she were a leaker, it would be obvious because she knows so much.”
That led Peretz to note: “Whatever the truth, Kellyanne’s reputation as a blabbermouth stuck, to the point where Kushner banned her from meetings.”
She maintained a persona that suggested she was Trump’s biggest ally but apparently that was really little more than smoke and mirrors.
“According to associates, she needed to remain Trump’s biggest champion, while privately insisting to those in the real world — the world from whence she came — that she was a sane person who understood that Trump was a mess. In the company of certain White House people, she referred to Trump multiple times as “a total f*cking misogynist,” according to a senior official.”
Conway is obviously quite chameleonic, obliquely trying to fit in according to the situation at hand. Whatever she may have felt about Trump she stuck by him and it caused friction as her husband George Conway, fed up with the way this man was running the country, became one of several founders of The Lincoln Project that ultimately helped to unseat him. The couple’s young daughter Claudia drifted away from her, a young progressive in the making.
Indeed that’s proof there are sometimes flowers among the weeds.