While White House counselor Kellyanne Conway still has to go to work and defend President Donald Trump, her outspoken attorney husband George holds no such allegiances. He made that clear once more on Friday with an insult.
In response to President Trump’s Friday afternoon announcement that the partial government shutdown would come to a temporary 21-day end without border wall money, Conway offered a blistering remark.
“Art of the Fool,” he said. He didn’t stop there.
The government shutdown had reached the 35-day mark on Friday.
The president said at the White House Rose Garden that Republicans and Democrats reached a deal to “end the shutdown and reopen the federal government. Trump said the deal would keep the government open for three weeks until Feb. 15.”
Conway was quoting a tweet that said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “exposed” the president as “pitifully weak.”
“In the showdown with Nancy Pelosi, Trump’s been exposed as pitifully weak, all bluster, a pathetic negotiator. Pelosi rolled him in every way. Egged on by right wingers, the whole thing was buffoonish from start to finish. *This* is how Trump’s Art of the Deal works in real life,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. that “deal[s] openly and explicitly with religious and moral issues in addressing contemporary issues.”
This represents the latest of increasingly direct Conway criticisms of his wife’s boss. A week and a half ago, he called the president a “disgrace.”
Before that, Conway criticized Trump for his susceptibility to flattery in the context of North Korean denuclearization efforts. Conway shared a quote from a Psychology Today article that was unmistakably aimed at Trump: “Researchers found that … the key difference between unsuccessful and successful psychopaths is that the former behave impulsively and irresponsibly, whereas the latter are able to inhibit or at least restrain destructive tendencies and build on their achievements.”
Conway also criticized Trump after James Mattis suddenly resigned as Secretary of Defense. At the time, he said Mattis’ resignation letter “speaks volumes” since he did not say “a word of praise for Trump.”
“Not a word of praise for Trump. Speaks volumes,” he said. “No pro forma ‘it has been a privilege to have worked with you to [something],’ or formulaic ‘I am proud that we were able to [fill in here]’—or even the usually obligatory ‘thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve,’” he continued.
Nor has President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani escaped Conway’s wrath. Conway recently criticized Giuliani for “making sh*t up” as he goes along.
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