Kellyanne Conway, the influential former White House adviser and campaign manager for Donald Trump, may be known for coining the dubious phrase “alternative facts”, but she was anything but evasive in her forthcoming memoir on the subject of her husband’s vociferous criticisms of Mr Trump.
In the book, Here’s The Deal, out on Tuesday, Ms Conway tears into her husband, Washington DC attorney and commentator George Conway, who had initially backed Mr Trump before turning into one of his loudest critics.
She writes that when she got home each night, Mr Conway was at work on “sneaky, almost sinister” attacks on the president, usually aired out on Twitter, a betrayal she considered tantamount to “cheating by tweeting”, according to excerpts of the book that have been shared with news outlets.
"I had two men in my life,” she writes in one section. “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 another, "I found out about it after it happened or as it was happening. It was sneaky, almost sinister. Why not own it, share it, sneer in my face with a copy of tomorrow’s Washington Post op-ed or next week’s Lincoln Project ad?"
At one point, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump even recommended marriage counselors, according to the book.
The Independent has contacted Mr Conway for comment.
Even for Washington, the Conways’ marriage is one of the stranger pairings in recent political history. Ms Conway was one of the president’s most loyal defenders on cable news, and Mr Conway one of his fieriest critics through prolific op-eds and viral videos from the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans on whose advisory board Mr Conway once served.
Though Mr Conway backed Mr Trump during the 2016 election, he eventually took to calling him a “pathological liar”, a sociopath, and “racist to the core,” declaring him unfit for the presidency and urging impeachment or removal from office.
The criticism was apparently pointed enough to earn Mr Conway a derisive nickname from the former president, a sign of being high on his enemies list. Mr Trump has referred to Mr Conway as a “deranged loser” and “Moonface”.
At the end of the book, she writes that Mr Trump told her at a 2021 dinner at Mar-a-Lago that she “made history” and “we’ll all be back” in the White House.
However, Mr Trump, now banned from Twitter, went after both Conways via an official statement from his PAC earlier this year, commenting on an unflattering photo of Mr Conway, “I don’t know what Kellyanne did to him, but it must have been really bad. She has totally destroyed this guy – his mind is completely shot!”
There was a time when Ms Conway was also a vocal Trump critic.
Before joining the Trump campaign, Ms Conway ran a super PAC on behalf of presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, where she called Mr Trump an “unpresidential,” “vulgar,” “thrice-married, non-churchgoing billionaire” who “says he’s for the little guy but actually built a lot of his businesses on the backs of the little guy.”
