OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former top political counselor Kellyanne Conway, who became the first woman to lead a successful presidential campaign when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, took aim at former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace in a new book due for release next month.
In a published excerpt from “Here’s The Deal,” Conway describes one interview with Wallace in which she says he attempted to bully her into speaking about her husband, George Conway, a noted vocal and public critic of her boss.
“This especially newsy weekend also included a surge in border crossings and Trump’s announcement that he was challenging Obamacare through the courts,” she begins.
“I addressed all of that in response to Wallace’s questions. I held forth with facts and figures about the southern border and the state of healthcare and insurance coverage. Wallace, a ratings-hungry anchor, had a full plate of breaking news in front of him,” Conway continued. “But he still found time to fit the other Conway into my segment.
“He introduced a new spin on the matter, echoing a theory from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who had told me at the British ambassador’s residence one night that she had declined an assignment from Vanity Fair to write a piece about George and me,” the former Trump aide continued.
“As if he were covering the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the building of the border wall in 2019, Wallace asked me a question about my husband: ‘Do you think he’s cyberbullying here to try to get you to quit?’” she wrote. “Do you think he’s jealous of your high profile?’”
“I had sadly and privately concluded that yes and possible were the answers to those questions, even though I was not going to be real-time and real-life bullied into discussing all this on national television,” she continued. “Rather, I quickly shut down the line of inquiry. My children did not need their parents attacking each other publicly.”
“I was speaking as a mother, not just as a senior counselor or a spouse,” she added. “But Wallace, the hard-news guy, was unmoved. He persisted and went for the clickbait.
“I guess the question I have to ask, bottom line, final question: Has this hurt your marriage?” she wrote, quoting Wallace.
“Oh, Chris, what are you, Oprah now? I mean, what am I — on a couch and you are a psychiatrist?” she responded.
Conway has also taken on other notable figures, some from Trump’s administration — including son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“There was no subject he considered beyond his expertise. Criminal justice reform. Middle East peace. The southern and northern borders. Veterans and opioids. Big Tech and small business,” she wrote.
“If Martian attacks had come across the radar, he would have happily added them to his ever-bulging portfolio. He’d have made sure you knew he’d exiled the Martians to Uranus and insisted he did not care who got credit for it,” she continued.
“He misread the Constitution in one crucial respect, thinking that all power not given to the federal government was reserved to him,” she added.
Ex-Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway trashes Jared Kushner as a ‘shrewd and calculating’ power-hungry backstabber — who sought to add to his portfolio without any accountability — in new White House memoir https://t.co/F7s2wmGFeI
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) May 23, 2022
Conway also did not spare her husband, George Conway, from criticism after he constantly and publicly belittled Trump throughout his term.
“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. Like everything George did during this time,” she writes in the book.
“Night after night, I would come home from a busy day at work … While I was minding dishes, dogs, laundry, managing adolescent dramas and traumas, George would be just steps away from me, tucked away in his home office, plotting against my boss and me,” wrote Conway.
