In How to Sell Your Soul to Donald Trump New York Times columnist Frank Bruni describes the previous opinions of Mike Pompeo and other Trump sycophants who once were vociferously anti-Trump.
To paraphrase a few of Bruni’s points:
- Pompeo sounded an alarm that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” He urged Republicans to come to their senses and resist the lure of the surging Trump campaign. “It’s time,” he said, “to turn down the lights on the circus.”….
- Lindsay Graham once called Trump “the world’s biggest jackass” and somehow decided that Trump was the new John McCain, which is like deeming tripe the new tenderloin.
- And what was Mick Mulvaney thinking when he agreed to be Trump’s third chief of staff, having witnessed the tortures of chiefs Nos. 1 and 2? Before Trump was elected, Mulvaney called him and Hillary Clinton “two of the most flawed human beings running for president in the history of the country,” and lest you think Trump was merely collateral damage in her disparagement, Mulvaney separately called Trump “a terrible human being.” Now he calls him boss. Amazing how revulsion crumbles when relevance is in the equation.
Bruni calls Kellyanne Conway the “dark empress of alternative facts” and sends readers to a link I found illuminating. He writes that “Kellyanne Conway was a respected, reasonably mainstream, uncontroversial Republican pollster and strategist” and adds that
“months before she joined Team Trump, she correctly labeled him “vulgar,” said that he wasn’t presidential, called him a liar and demanded his tax returns. Then he offered her the lofty job of managing his presidential campaign — and all the television airtime that came with it — and she turned herself into a kowtowing cartoon. She’ll never be seen the same way again. Was the ride really worth it?”
I am a retired psychotherapist who did a lot of marriage counseling in my career and I have often wondered what the Conway’s marriage is like considering how public Mr. Conway has been in his warnings about how dangerous the president is. Then I read the article in Media Matters from 2016 thanks to the link in Bruni’s OpEd:
Here’s How Trump’s New Campaign Manager Attacked Him As A Cable News Pundit.
The only high profile couple in modern times who had vastly opposing political views were James Carville and Mary Matalin (see Matalin, Carville recall finding 'Love’) but neither of them were hypocritical sellouts.
After reading about Kellyanne’s history I can’t imagine how George Conway puts up with her. Here are the bullet points and Kellyanne quotes from Media Matters:
- Trump “Says He's For The Little Guy But He's Actually Built A Lot Of His Businesses On The Backs Of The Little Guy.”
- Trump Victims Include “Victims Of Trump University, Victims Of Trump In Atlantic City.”
- “I Would Like To See” Trump’s Tax Returns “Be Transparent.”
- Conway Condemned Trump For “Hurl[ing] Personal Insults” And Using “Vulgar” Language That Was “Unfortunate For Children.
- Trump “Can Whine And Complain” By Saying “The System Is Rigged,” But “There’s No Place In Politics For Accusing Folks Of Using Gestapo Tactics.”
- Conway Accused The Trump Campaign Of Becoming Too “Cozy With The Establishment”: “Goodness, You’ve Hired Paul Manafort.”
- Trump's “False” Accusations About The Cruz Campaign Show “The Danger Of Just Saying Things That Aren't True."
- Unlike Trump, “Pro-Life Candidates” “Don’t Need Four Or Five Times To Get It Right.”
Kellyanne would seem to be the opposite of a criminal having a “come to Jesus moment” and then devoting her life to good deeds and making reparations. Like her husband she was a mainstream rational Republican who found her “Jesus” in Donald Trump for reasons we may never know decided to become his Saint Peter.
Perhaps George Conway’s love for his wife so deep, so forgiving, so all-abiding that he will stay with her the way a a spouse stays with a partner who lives up to the sickness and health marriage vows and stays with them even if they succumb to mental illness or dementia? I can’t imagine that George is able to compartmentalize his feelings since he seems very self-aware. I can’t imagine being married to anyone whose values and lack of a moral compass was so at odds with my beliefs.
I just don’t know how they stay together. (Please weigh in with your comments.)
As for Kellyanne, did she see “the light” or go mad, or did she make her decision out of unadulterated ambition? What do you think? Take the poll.
This is the second time I wrote about the Conway’s marriage. This is from July 23rd: A lesson in using humor to cope with the most puzzling marriage in Trumpland. Since then George Conway has become ever more public in his attacks against Trump, most recently in The Atlantic.
Sunday, Oct 6, 2019 · 2:46:28 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Just published: Inside the marriage of Kellyanne and George Conway, who are worth $39 million and increasingly facing off over Trump
Quotes related to the marriage:
- Kellyanne told The Post she thought George's tweets were "disrespectful." She elaborated, saying, "It's a violation of basic decency, certainly, if not marital vows."
- Kellyanne suggested to The Post that she feels torn between the two of them. "I feel there's a part of him that thinks I chose Donald Trump over him. Which is ridiculous. One is my work and one is my marriage."
- Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker asked, "why is it considered the ultimate insult to call a man 'Mr. [Insert Wife’s Name Here]'?" To that, George responded, "It isn't—except perhaps to the extremely juvenile and boorish. What I really wouldn't want to be called is 'Individual-[ ],'" referring to the way Trump is characterized in Muller's court filings.
- After months of shrugging off questions about her marriage, Kellyanne notably attended the September 20 State Dinner with the Australian first couple alone.
From July:
Not since James Carville and Mary Maitlin have we had a high profile married couple on opposite sides of the political spectrum. See “Matalin, Carville recall finding 'Love’” from Politico in 2013. Maitlin changed her party registration to Libertarian from Republican in 2016. (Read story)
Carville and Maitlin both were engaging and charming their different ways. Until now nobody in a politically mismatched marriage was like Carville what with his humorous quirkiness. Now we have George Conway.
I did a lot of marriage counselling in my career. When I worked in community mental health and we had clinical staff meetings where we discussed tough cases we sometimes referred to the most difficult marriage counselling clients, those who left us frustrated and exhausted, as “couples from hell.” My impression is that Kellyanne would make marriage counselling sessions challenging, to say the least.
Humor is considered the healthiest defence mechanism and way to cope with stress, even extreme stress. One example is how humour helped Jews deal with the Holocaust:
Finding humor in a situation is finding some incongruity, that is, some disparity between the way things are and the way they should be; and that requires a critical mind. Successful comedians are never unintelligent or unnoticing people. During the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, humorists were among the first to call attention to what was going wrong. The earliest criticisms of the Nazis came not from politicians or clergy, but from cabaret entertainers and newspaper cartoonists. At a time when most Americans did not want to know what was going on in Europe, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator called our attention to Hitler’s insanity.
In the ghettoes, Hitler’s “masterpiece” was referred to as Mein Krampf (My Cramp). His theory of the Master Race was the butt of dozens of jokes. There are two kinds of Aryans, one went: non-Aryans and barb-Aryans. Others mocked the disparity between the icon of the tall, blonde, muscular Aryan and the actual physiques of Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering. From “Humor in the Holocaust: Its Critical, Cohesive, and Coping Functions” by John Morreall, Ph.D.
Wikipedia tells us that “in March 2019, President Trump responded to criticism from Kellyanne's husband George by describing George as a ‘stone cold LOSER & husband from hell’. Kellyanne defended her boss, Trump, by saying that George Conway is ‘not a psychiatrist’ and that Trump should be expected to respond when George, ‘a non-medical professional accuses him of having a mental disorder.’ “ (Read: Kellyanne Conway defends Trump after he attacked her husband — 'You think he should just take that sitting down?' she says about Trump after George Conway questioned his mental fitness.)
While not a psychiatrist, George Conway knows a lot about psychiatry and in fact in back in March he gave Trump the same diagnosis which I’ve been writing about for two years and which I wrote about yesterday.
George Conway sometimes gets serious, as he did on May 16th in his Washington Post OpEd:
“No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him," Conway wrote. "No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.”
George Conway also frequently uses humorous biting and sarcastic tweets to keep his sanity to no doubt to send a message to his wife, and to her other husband, Donald J. Trump. It helps that he is very clever and genuinely funny. Trump’s attempts at humor are awkward, crude, and should be embarrassing. He’d be booed off the stage at a comedy club. George Conway would be a headliner.
I can’t imagine what their home life is like.
What do they talk about?
Is talk about Trump verboten?
How does he handle it when not only does his wife defend Trump, but behaves badly herself like when she asked a Jewish reporter what his ethnicity was? (Video)
Is their love so deep and abiding that none of this matters?
Are they staying together for the sake of their four children?
Do they have some kind of deal to put off divorce as long as Kellyanne has her job?
What do you think, will their marriage survive Trump?