What a piece of work…
This is one book I’m not going to read, but I thought the review in the Bulwark was pretty interesting. There’s something seriously wrong with her:
Set up with George Conway by her good friend Ann Coulter, and following an elaborate courtship, Kellyanne married the high-powered conservative attorney in an April 2001 wedding where, as she recounts here in inordinate detail, caviar, escargot, Alaskan king crab legs, sea bass, filet mignon, and a Viennese dessert selection were on the menu. Following a honeymoon, the happy couple moved into the “super-luxurious and super-tall” Trump World Tower in New York, where “our new neighbors included Bill Gates, Sophia Loren, and Naomi Campbell.”
I hate her on that basis alone … but it gets worse:
Kellyanne moved around in right-wing circles, and during the Obama years she circulated with figures like Steve Bannon and became close to the far-right donor Rebekah Mercer. A revolt on the Trump World Tower condominium board brought the Conways into personal contact with Trump himself, and on his side in the dispute, forging a relationship. Contemplating entering the New York gubernatorial race, Trump sought out Kellyanne’s advice. In the end, Trump demurred on the run. He had his eyes on a bigger prize.
When the 2015 presidential campaign season opened, Trump attempted to recruit Kellyanne for his fledgling campaign, but she chose to work for a Ted Cruz super PAC, a perch from which she skillfully bashed the rising Trump in numerous television appearances. But by May 2016, Cruz was defeated and the Republican nomination was effectively in Trump’s hands, and on July 1, 2016, Kellyanne started working for the man she had been denigrating. Six weeks after she began, the ethically challenged (soon to be felonious) campaign chairman Paul Manafort was out the door of Trump Tower and Kellyanne was installed in his place.
On October 7, 2016, just one month before Election Day, the Trump campaign struck an iceberg, and Kellyanne Conway had to navigate the “grab ’em by the p%$#y” Access Hollywood tape. Kellyanne spins it here as artfully as she did on the campaign trail.
Those of us closest to him, literally at that moment, were in a state of disbelief. . . . The words spilling forth on the eleven-year-old tape were vulgar and vile. I certainly couldn’t square them with the brilliant, fun-loving, respectful man who had been the first Republican to elevate a woman to the top spot of his campaign.
Is this some kind of a satire? Is she delusional? The “brilliant, fun-loving, respectful” man had insulted everyone from Megyn Kelly to Rand Paul to a disabled reporter and beyond up to that point. WTF????
But yeah, he won:
Three-and-a-half years of public service ensued, if public service is what we can call her relentless spinning. The memoir traipses through some—but by no means all—of the incidents and controversies that enveloped the Trump presidency. The Mueller investigation she dismisses as “political proctology.” Of the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal immigrants, she writes unconvincingly: “The policy itself did not separate parents and children, but the result of applying the policy in some instances did.” A distinction without a difference. Of Trump’s disastrous handling of COVID, in particular, his lying about what he knew about the seriousness of the disease and his continual undermining of public health guidelines, she says not a word.
Kellyanne also walks readers through the infighting that plagued the White House staff. A particular target of her ire is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who comes across as out of his depth—“part dreamer, part schemer”—yet invested with enormous power. But we are also introduced to “a preternaturally paranoid” Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff. We encounter Steve Bannon, then a ranking White House official, leaking incessantly and “busy buffing his image in the media, sowing discord among other staffers, and undermining his rivals (real and imagined).” Ivanka, the president’s posturing daughter, we’re told, like her father, is “brilliant.” From the evidence presented in this memoir, one can fairly question the proposition that Trump hired only the very best.
Ivanka is not brilliant. That’s just ridiculous. She’s a rich socialite. Period. Also a crook.
And what about George?
A major focus of the memoir is the curious case of Kellyanne’s husband. George Conway, as the entire sentient world knows, started out as an ardent Trump supporter, going so far as to seek (unsuccessfully) a high-ranking position in the Justice Department. But as events unfolded, he had a radical change of mind. Even as his wife was working to burnish Trump’s image, George had taken to the media, especially to Twitter, to tear it down, calling the administration, among other things, “a shit show in a dumpster fire.”
Pages upon pages are devoted to what Kellyanne calls George’s “small insolent strikes,” which she labors to explain, even to herself. “Clearly,” she writes, “he was cheating by tweeting. I was having a hard time competing with his new fling.” More: “I had two men in my life. One was my husband. One was my boss, who happened to be president of the United States. One of those men was defending me. And it wasn’t George Conway. It was Donald Trump.” It is more than passing strange that, even as she bemoans her loss of personal privacy, she carries on about her husband’s supposed betrayal in such a public way. Something is askew.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever understand the weird political marriage between those two. it makes no sense to me. I’d rather be married to a rattlesnake than Kellyanne Conway. If it’s an act it’s a perfect one for our times: two con artists, destroying our democracy, for fame and power (they already had a fortune.) If it isn’t an act, they’re both incredibly weird.
Maybe george is just one of those “cucks” as the wingnuts call cuckolds:
“I love Donald Trump,” Kellyanne states baldly at one juncture. Love is blinding, as they say, if her feelings for Trump are indeed love, not something uttered to position herself for some ingratiating purpose. Whatever her true sentiments, the picture of Trump that emerges from the memoir is preposterous. She finds Trump’s halting bumbling reading off the teleprompter “eloquent.” “I will always tell you the truth,” is how, without comment, she quotes Trump—never mind his prodigious ability to tell multiple lies in one breath.
Again, this has to be some kind of joke. She can’t be serious. It’s must be some kind of performance art.
Whatever you do, don’t buy this book. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene has more integrity.