Trump says what normal decent people know not to say
It makes me feel like I’d been drinking clean good water for a long time and then found sewage pouring from the tap. I had not read or heard much from our former president since he began fading from the front pages when he finally tired of the election scam. And then I saw his comment on the breakup of his aide’s marriage.
“Congratulations to Kellyanne Conway on her DIVORCE from her wacko husband, Mr. Kellyanne Conway,” he blasted on his “Truth Social” site. “Free at last, she has finally gotten rid of the disgusting albatross around her neck. She is a great person, and will now be free to lead the kind of life that she deserves … and it will be a great life without the extremely unattractive loser by her side!”
He’d done this before. He’d tweeted in 2019, when the Conways were spatting about something: “George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”
I know almost nothing of the Conways, other than that Mrs. Conway feels no binding concern for telling the truth — advocate of “alternative facts” as she is — and that Mr. Conway didn’t seem to mind making his wife’s life unnecessarily difficult. From what I can tell from so far outside, I can see how being married to either one might be hard for the other.
Marriage can be hard enough as it is in normal life. The Conways live in a world that elevates the pursuit of power over every normal human commitment. It forces on most people in it stark choices between advancement and the people and things to which they have pledged themselves. Some people can do it, but many can’t. We outsiders rarely see the costs, because the damage is often suffered not so much by the power-players as by those close to them.
Who knows what goes on in a marriage, even the marriage of two publicity hounds? We don’t know who’s at fault and how much fault there is, and what pressure they were under and how hard they resisted it. We don’t know how much pain they feel and how much relief. A marriage is a black box to everyone else, even to those closest to the couple.
We do know it’s the end of something that began in joy and hope, the loss of an intimate relation both partners (presumably) tried to make work. A divorce may be for the best, may even be necessary, but it’s still a loss, a defeat. It is ideally something that should not be. Especially when the once-loving couple talk about each other the way the Conways do now.
Normal people know that. If you have to speak about someone else’s marriage breaking up, and you probably don’t — Mr. Trump certainly didn’t — you express regret and sympathy. You promise your support and care, and speak of your hope for the future. You may be on Team Wife or Team Husband, but you don’t trash the other one, especially when the couple say they’re divorcing amicably and are most concerned for their children.
What the normal decent person doesn’t do is insert himself into the story and use it to score points against his enemies. The normal decent person doesn’t fold the couple and their loss into his personal me-against-the-world narrative. He doesn’t push himself into the limelight. Donald Trump does.
Admittedly, to be fair to the man, Mr. Trump may know something the rest of us don’t know. He probably doesn’t, because he judges people by their relation to him. Being such an implacable critic of Mr. Trump’s is enough for Mr. Trump to call George Conway a disgusting albatross, unattractive loser, and husband from hell, were he in fact St. Francis of Assisi. But a normal decent person who knew something everyone else didn’t know would still be careful to speak — if he had to and again he probably wouldn’t — in a way that wouldn’t risk making things worse. Donald Trump does.
Even being in the newspaper business, I’d had a blissfully Trump-free few months. He’s not really news at this point midway between presidential elections, try as he might to be news. He’s not going to speak of such things as allies’ divorces in the way normal decent people. But maybe, just maybe, he could not say anything?