Saturday Night Live put out a parody of the new movie Marriage Story on Saturday. Guess what it ribs: the actual union between top Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway and her husband, conservative attorney and prolific Trump critic George Conway. Oh, dear.
The skit does a pretty thorough job looking through the couple’s real-life public dynamic: from George’s (Beck Bennett) constant tweeting, his subtweets and outright messages toward wife Kellyanne (Kate McKinnon), President Donald Trump calling George a “LOSER & husband from hell,” and George’s habit of saying the president has narcissistic personality disorder or some other diagnosable mental disorder.
It even evokes some people’s suspicion that the couple is kayfabing their public disagreements for attention and social capital. An example, from a 2018 profile in The Washington Post:
There’s a theory among D.C. Trumpologists that this is all a charade. A way for the Conways to be part of both the Trump White House and the Trump-leery establishment. They live in a part of the city where wealth and influence serve as a cooling balm for the partisan inflammation that has spread elsewhere. In their neighborhood, everybody — Democrat and Republican — belongs to the garden party.
You might recall that according to Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, Kellyanne Conway said she hated Trump and she insisted during the 2016 presidential campaign that she was just representing him for the money. And as for husband George, it’s not like he’s some sort of liberal. He lowkey worked to undermine Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, cementing himself as an informal Republican operative with close links to hard-right media. As the SNL skit references, Ann Coulter introduced Kellyanne and George in the first place. Before becoming one of the president’s most high-profile critics, it wasn’t shocking that George Conway discussed joining the Department of Justice under Trump.
[Screengrab via Saturday Night Live]