President calls husband of adviser ‘total loser’
WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump declared Tuesday morning that the husband of one of his top aides, Kellyanne Conway, was a “total loser.”
The husband in question, George T. Conway III, a prominent conservative lawyer, has been publicly critical of Trump for months. But in recent days he has escalated those attacks on Twitter by reigniting a conversation about the president’s mental health and saying Trump was a malignant narcissist who fits the profile for narcissistic personality disorder.
Aides have been pressing Trump to simply ignore George Conway, who in a phone interview Tuesday said he viewed it as a “badge of honor” to be called a loser by someone he believes is unfit to hold the nation’s highest office, and
said the president’s reaction only “proves the point I made yesterday.”
Trump’s attack on Conway was not unusual for the language he used or for the medium through which he employed it. Over the past two years, Trump has proved that trivial, personal fights are not a distraction from the work he is doing in office, but a core feature of the image he wants to project. He called Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of state, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell” after Tillerson
criticized him in an interview in December for being undisciplined. He has taken the bait on almost every negative book written about him by a former staff member or a journalist, helping to elevate those tomes to the best-seller lists by declaring, via Twitter, that their authors are “a mess!” (Cliff Sims), a “lowlife” (Omarosa Manigault Newman) or an “idiot” (Bob Woodward).
Singling out Kellyanne Conway’s husband for presidential critique put the focus back on one of Washington’s most discussed marriages, even as Conway has tried to defuse the coverage of her husband by not commenting about him on the record because, she has told friends, of how it would affect her children.
Trump appeared to be provoked by a tweet from his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who wrote: “We all know that @realDonaldTrump turned down Mr. Kellyanne Conway for a job he desperately wanted. He barely worked @TheJusticeDept and was either fired/quit, didn’t want the scrutiny? Now he hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success. POTUS doesn’t even know him!”
In fact, George Conway withdrew his name from consideration for a top job at the Justice Department, running its civil division, before he ever started. And he has known Trump for decades.