Conway Family Drama Is A Story Of Trump, Emancipation, Super PACs, And Social Media

Kellyanne Conway has proven to be one of the most loyal voices within President Donald Trump’s administration, transitioning from campaign manager to White House counselor after Trump’s election in 2016. However, her time is coming to an end as she said August will mark her final month serving the administration.

“This is completely my choice and my voice,” Conway, 53, said in a press release. “In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

Conway’s imminent depart serves as the proverbial crescendo to the drama that has engulfed her family since 2018.

The public got its first glimpse of tensions after her husband of 19 years, George Conway, co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in November 2018 critical of Trump. George Conway, 56, and his co-writer, Neal Katyal, wrote the piece in response to the firing of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and subsequent appointment of Matthew Whitaker.

Trump used the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to appoint Whitaker as the interim U.S. Attorney General until William Barr’s appointment, but George Conway and Katyal argued this was a mistake and violated the Constitutional requirement for the U.S. Senate to approve all presidential appointees.

“For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document,” George Conway and Katyal wrote.

Along with the op-ed, George Conway began publicly criticizing Trump and his administration in various media appearances.

“I don’t feel comfortable being a Republican anymore,” Conway told the Skullduggery Podcast in 2018. “I think the Republican Party has become something of a personality cult.”

He praised the job his wife did in helping to get Trump elected and said there was an apparent offer to join the administration. However, he said his disdain for Trump and the general state of the administration were the driving reasons for him staying away from the White House.

“I’m filling out the financial forms and it’s like — I forget what time of year it was, it was like late April — man, I’m thinking,” Conway said on the podcast. “I’m watching this thing, and it’s like the administration is like a s***show in a dumpster fire. And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do that. I don’t know.'

“And then you got the Comey firing, and then you got [Trump] going on TV saying, ‘I had Russia on my mind,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, no.’ And then I’m driving home one day from New York, and it’s like ‘Robert Mueller appointed special counsel,’ and then I realized, this guy is going to be at war with the Justice Department.”

Trump has not taken kindly to George Conway’s ongoing criticisms, leading to several of his staple Twitter attacks against his adviser and former campaign manager’s husband. Arguably Trump’s most famous insult was calling George Conway the “husband from hell” in March 2019 on Twitter.

George Conway didn’t relent, leading him to help found the Lincoln Project, a conservative super PAC with the goal defeating Trump in the 2020 general election. Its mission outline simply reads “defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.”

Kellyanne Conway was dismissive of the super PAC, referring to it as a PAC created by a group of failed campaign managers.

“They never got a president elected into the White House,” Kellyanne Conway said during a December 2019 White House briefing. “I’m sure that hurts, very much. But they never really accommodated the growing Republican Party and understood how to beat Democrats and we did.”

The tensions between the husband and wife over Trump would eventually spill over to their daughter, Claudia, one of their four children. She has expounded opinions that are a far cry from her politically conservative parents. She has repeatedly voiced her support for firebrand progressives, most notably The Squad and has jokingly asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to adopt her on social media.

This came to ahead in July 2020 when Claudia was temporarily banned from Twitter and TikTok by her mother after livestreaming an argument between her parents. She took it a step further with a since deleted tweet at her father saying “sorry [his] marriage failed.”

Claudia, 15, has since asked for emancipation from her parents over what she said was “years of childhood trauma and abuse.” She said aside from getting Trump out of office, she shares no similar opinions with her father and was “devastated” her mother was set to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention.