Kellyanne Conway said that her husband George violated their marriage vows by tweeting adversely about her then-boss Trump, and that it was her husband who encouraged her to become the former president’s campaign manager.
The former Trump adviser appeared on CNN Saturday morning to discuss her new book, ‘Here’s the Deal: A Memoir,’ and went on a rant about her husband when CNN anchor Michael Smerconish questioned about the condition of their marriage.
When the host inquired if they were doing well, Conway was vague. Since the publication of her book at the end of May, she has repeatedly avoided inquiries about whether they are still married or planning to split.
She only admitted to CBS’ Gayle King that they do not wear their wedding rings.
While Conway worked for Trump – first as his campaign manager when he was running for office in 2016 and then as his senior advisor when he became president, her husband became one of her boss’s highest-profile critics.
His running commentary on Twitter about the former president and his administration made for a slew of headlines, with many wondering about the state of their marriage.
‘You know, in 2016, known as the year of the tweet, George Conway sent zero tweets,’ Conway said on the show Saturday. ‘Now he’s sent over 100,000.
‘He can change his mind about Donald Trump, this is a free country, George has no allegiance to a political party or presidential candidate but his vows to me I feel were broken because we were all in.’
Conway added that her husband had seemingly become an expert on many things people wanted him to be, but all she wanted was her husband.
‘I just did not want to be stuck in a cable news segment in the master bedroom hearing about Trump, Trump, Trump,’ Conway said.
‘And I think George became an expert on many things people wanted him to be, and all I really wanted was my husband and the father of my children as I always had him.’
She also pointed out that it her husband who urged her to take the campaign management job.
‘You know, I also write in the book, Michael, that people like to say without Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump would not have gotten elected president of the United States, that’s debatable,’ she stated.
‘But without George Conway urging, if not insisting me, his wife, to take that campaign management job and helping out with more with the kids and home, I don’t see how I could be the campaign manager the level I was. George was my partner.’
‘I gave up millions of dollars to go be a public servant in the White House. George wanted to have a big job in the Trump administration, we moved our family to Washington as a family. He changed his mind about Donald Trump somewhere along the way. Famously, Donald Trump never changes. I didn’t change my mind.’
Kellyanne’s memoir was billed by her publisher as a look beyond the headlines of the Trump administration and her family life, including her husband. The book was released in May.
That prompted a rejoinder from Conway: ‘Your boss apparently thought so.’
George repeatedly questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office. Trump called the husband of his senior aide a ‘total loser.’
At one point, Saturday Night Live did a ‘Marriage Story’ parody of their relationship, with Scarlett Johansson playing the role of couples counselor.
In an example of the tweets George would spout off about Trump, he wrote in 2019: ‘Don’t assume that the things he says and does are part of a rational plan or strategy, because they seldom are.
‘Consider them as a product of his pathologies, and they make perfect sense.’
At the time, his wife steered away from discussing their relationship or the impact of the tweets.
But in her memoir, she describes how it felt like he was being unfaithful.
‘During this time, the frequency and ferocity of his tweets accelerated. Clearly, he was cheating by tweeting,’ she wrote. ‘I was having a hard time competing with his new fling.
‘I had already said publicly what I’d said privately to George: that his daily deluge of insults-by-tweet against my boss—or, as he put it sometimes, ‘the people in the White House’—violated our marriage vows to ‘love, honor, and cherish’ each other.’
In 2019, Conway even found herself talking to Trump’s daughter about the effect it was having.
Ivanka Trump suggested couples therapy might help Conway’s marriage and explained that she understood what Conway was going through.
‘I am in a family of Democrats,’ she said, referring to at least some of the Kushners. ‘I get it.’
Trump’s daughter later handed her a Post-it note with ‘the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy.’
‘I noticed she had avoided putting that in a text or an email. I appreciated the information and her thoughtfulness and wanted to pursue it,’ Conway recalled in excerpts previously obtained by DailyMail.com.
‘After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘okay’ to the other while looking at his phone. We never went.
‘He spent his time exactly how he wanted to. If it was important to him, he would have made it happen.’
The drama continued into 2020, when Conway revealed along with a flurry of top Trump officials that she had contracted COVID-19.
But her daughter Claudia beat her to the punch with a post on TikTok. ‘Update my mom has covid,’ she wrote at the time. ‘im furious. Wear your masks. dont listen to our idiot f***ing president piece of s***. protect yourself and those around you,’ she wrote in another post.
When she learned Kellyanne would be speaking at the Republican National Convention, she tweeted: ‘I’m (devastated) that my mother is actually speaking at the RNC. like DEVASTATED beyond compare.’
The family drama got even more attention when Claudia Conway appeared as a contestant on American Idol, with both of her parents providing testimonials.
After a lengthy public airing of squabbles, Claudia posted in July that she and her mom had mended fences. ‘forgiveness has taught me a lot. i love my mother and she will always inspire me, despite our public conflicts. i am proud that we are living proof of breaking the cycle,’ she wrote.
Conway is a prominent Republican pollster and consultant who first supported Texas Senator Ted Cruz in 2016, but then backed Trump and became his campaign manager when he defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton in one of the largest upsets in American political history.
She was a top presidential adviser and one of the longest-serving officials of an administration noted for churn.
Conway left the company at the end of August 2020, claiming the desire to spend more time with her family.
Conway’s most famous words to date are likely ‘alternative facts,’ her description in 2017 of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s bogus claim that the new president drew the ‘largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,’ both in person and ‘around the globe.’
Conway’s legitimacy became a point of contention in the discussion over whether she should be invited on news shows, with NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen dubbing her a “fog machine.”
CNN’s Don Lemon stated it was ‘beneath the dignity of this network’ to interview her in 2019, not long before colleague Dana Bash featured Conway in a segment for her current series ‘Badass Women of Washington.’