When it comes to married couples with strong political disagreements, conservative attorney George Conway and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway give Democratic strategist James Carville and ex-Republican turned Libertarian Mary Matalin a run for their money. But unlike Carville and Matalin, the Conways are members of the same party. Both are right-wing Republicans, but while Kellyanne Conway is one of President Donald Trump’s most persistent defenders and sycophants, George Conway has been a frequent Trump critic—and their differences were obvious on Monday morning, March 18. While KC was vigorously defending the president’s response to the March 15 terrorist shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” GC was on Twitter questioning the president’s mental health. Trump, GC maintains, suffers from “narcissistic personality disorder.”
Brad Parscale, a GOP strategist and 2020 Trump reelection campaign manager, weighed in on GC’s anti-Trump comments with a silly, childish tweet that was right out of the Trumpian playbook: GC, Parscale posted, “hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success” (at 43, Parscale sounds like he’s still in high school). But GC, who has argued a securities case before the U.S. Supreme Court, is hardly obscure or unknown—and he has been a prominent voice in anti-Trump conservatism.
Here are some of George Conway’s most memorable anti-Trump moments:
1. George Conway lambasted Trump for comments on Obama’s ‘57 states’ gaffe
When President-to-Be Barack Obama said, in 2008, that he had visited all “57 states” during his campaign, it was a slip of the tongue: Obama, a constitutional law professor, obviously knew there were only 50 states. But a decade later in September 2018, Trump cited that gaffe as an example of pro-Obama bias in the mainstream media—tweeting, “When President Obama said that he has been to ‘57 States,’ very little mention in Fake News Media. Can you imagine if I said that…story of the year!” And George Conway responded on Twitter, posting, “Needless to say, there’s a huge difference between an isolated slip of the tongue and ceaseless, shameless, and witless prevarication on virtually all topics, large and small.”
2. Conway attacked Trump for temporary Matthew Whitaker appointment
On occasion, George Conway and Democratic attorney Neal K. Katyal have joined forces for some bipartisan op-eds criticizing the president—and one of their best was published in the New York Times on November 8, 2018. After the 2018 midterms, the president fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and appointed Matthew Whitaker (a major critic of Mueller’s Russia probe) as a temporary replacement. And GC and Katyal attacked Trump for replacing Sessions with an unquestioning loyalist, writing in their op-ed, “Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals.”
3. Conway has vigorously defended Mueller’s investigation
Trump has repeatedly denounced Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as a baseless, partisan “witch hunt”—a view that George Conway doesn’t share. On June 11, 2018, Conway defended the constitutionality of Mueller’s probe in a 3500-word essay published on the Lawfare blog. In the essay, titled “The Terrible Arguments Against the Constitutionality of the Mueller Investigation,” Conway wrote, “It isn’t very surprising to see the president tweet a meritless legal position because, as a non-lawyer, he wouldn’t know the difference between a good one and a bad one.”
4. Conway challenged Trump’s views on birthright citizenship
During an October 2018 interview with Axios, Trump proposed ending birthright citizenship via an executive order—and George Conway and Katyal responded with a bipartisan October 30 op-ed for the Washington Post that explained why Trump’s proposal was so anti-Constitution. Delving into the history of the 14th Amendment, GC and Katyal explained that the U.S. Supreme Court has been upholding the constitutionality of birthright citizenship since the 19th Century—and that a “constitutional amendment would indeed be necessary to revoke” it.
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