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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?