Kellyanne Conway hails Mueller report as 'complete exoneration' while her husband compares Trump to cancer
While their highly conflicting views on the president reflect a hostile political divide in the US, the perceived contentious relationship between Kellyanne Conway and her husband George gives us hope as a nation that we can thrive together despite staunch political differences.
Kellyanne served as Donald Trump's campaign manager during the 2016 presidential race, and ever since the controversial real estate mogul took office, he has successfully wedged himself between the Conways on multiple occasions.
George has publicly denigrated the president since day one, often describing him as "incompetent" for the role. In response, the commander-in-chief has branded the conservative lawyer and commentator a "stone cold LOSER" — once claiming he had turned him down for a job in the US justice department.
Meanwhile, Kellyanne has always been a bulwark for the president while facing the press. At the same time, she also rallies for her husband — once clarifying it was her husband who withdrew his name from consideration for the position in the justice department.
As we inch closer to the 2020 presidential election, the counselor to the president remains entangled between her boss and her husband. Nonetheless, the Conway marriage is an embodiment of the way people are divided over the White House.
Just hours after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's bombshell report on Thursday, Kellyanne defended President Trump: emphasizing on its conclusion that his campaign did not collude with the Russians.
Addressing reporters on the White House driveway Thursday, Conway said, “This has been a political proctology exam and he's emerging with a clean bill of health. There's no other way to look at it." She added that it was “really the best day since he got elected," and that the White House was "accepting apologies today, too, for anybody who feels the grace in offering them.”
After the release of the redacted 448-page report Thursday morning, Attorney General William Barr told a press conference that no Americans knowingly assisted Russian efforts to meddle with the 2016 election.
“We had no advance notice,” Conway said. “But we already knew what was not in the report, and that is collusion or obstruction. This president and his team did not interfere whatsoever in the Department of Justice’s attempt to get millions of pages of documents and dozens of witnesses. There was no attempt to redact any portion of the report. There was no assertion of executive privilege.”
When asked about the rather embarrassing aspects of the report, Conway urged reporters to focus on "intent" rather than the relentless discourse on mainstream media.
“So?” she asked. “Intent matters, and that's the whole point here. Look, what all these people have had to say over millions of words, thousands of hours on TV, in print, on Twitter, has zero legal significance. What matters is what the Department of Justice and the special counsel concluded here, which is no collusion, no obstruction, and complete exoneration, as the president says.”
Meanwhile, George Conway, her husband, wrote a scathing hit-piece on the POTUS for Greenwich Time.
"Fiduciaries are people who hold legal obligations of trust, like a trustee of a trust," he wrote. "A trustee must act in the beneficiary's best interests and not his own. If the trustee fails to do that, the trustee can be removed, even if what the trustee has done is not a crime."
The conservative lawman has been critical of the Trump administration for the longest time. In the wake of the Mueller findings, he likened the goings-on at the Trump White House to Richard Nixon's controversial presidency. "White House counsel John Dean famously told Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing. What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald Trump," adding that "Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay."
The supposed rift between the Conways perfectly encapsulates the quarrelsome mood of the country, at the same time portraying the explosive nature of US politics.
But the Conways are still together despite the monumental pressure on their marriage from the White House. While their personal disagreements may have bled into their politics time and again, it is really inspiring to see them work out their differences and move ahead every single time.
One can argue that the Conways reflect the dynamic of a larger debate about politics in the US, more than their outspoken and contrarian views about the president.
However, despite their often-clashing stances on the public forum, they have quite a lot in common. The duo, who married in 2001, have four children together. In one unusual incident, George told a reporter that his frequent barrage of attacks against the sitting president was simply a way to vent on social media.
This is not to discount the fact that the Conways have strong political views individually and often disagree with each other in public. That said, their marriage definitely offers a ray of hope for a country that has never been so divided in the past.