Appearing live on CNN Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, special counselor to President Trump, was asked to respond to the assessment given by her husband, George, that testimony of career diplomats in the first public impeachment hearings was damning for her boss.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer and outspoken Trump critic, appeared on MSNBC as a guest analyst during Thursday’s hearings.
While introducing a clip of George Conway, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told Kellyanne Conway he wanted to ask her a “sensitive” political question.
“I don’t want to talk about your marriage,” Blitzer said. “I know there are issues there.”
Kellyanne Conway was taken aback.
“What did you just say?” she asked. “Did you just say there are issues there?”
Blitzer repeated that he did not want to discuss her marriage, that he just wanted her to respond to the “substance” of her husband’s criticism.
“He’s a legal scholar,” Blitzer said, an assertion that also seemed to catch her off-guard. “He happens to be married to you.”
“He happens to be married to me? That’s bizarre,” Kellyanne Conway said.
Eventually, Blitzer played the clip of George Conway, who strongly criticized the Trump administration’s repeated asks for Ukraine’s government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 presidential candidate.
“The problem with Donald Trump is he always sees himself first. Trump is all about Trump. And that’s why it was inevitable he’d get himself into this,” George Conway said in the MSNBC clip. “That’s what this is all about. He was using the power of the presidency in its most unchecked area — foreign affairs — to advance his own personal interests as opposed to the country’s.”
Kellyanne Conway refused to engage with her husband’s analysis, saying only, “That is his opinion.”
But she had plenty to say about Blitzer’s decision to ask her about it.
“Where is the shame?” Kellyanne Conway said. “What you just quoted is said every single day by other voices, but you wanted to put it in my husband’s voice because you think somehow that that will help your ratings or that you’re really sticking it to Kellyanne Conway.
“And let me make very clear. You didn’t stick it to Kellyanne Conway,” she continued. “I think you embarrassed yourself, and I’m embarrassed for you.”
She added: “I looked up to you when I was in college and law school, I would turn on CNN to see what Wolf Blitzer had to say about war, famine, disruption abroad. I really respected you for all those years as somebody who would give us the news, and now the news is what somebody’s husband says on a different network.”
George Conway has emerged as a persistent Trump critic, frequently using his Twitter feed and penning newspaper op-eds to draw attention to what he calls the president’s malignant narcissism.
In March, for instance, he questioned Trump’s mental health, posting sections of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to his Twitter feed.
Trump, in return, called George Conway “a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”
In July, amid the firestorm over Trump’s comments about the self-proclaimed “Squad” of freshman Democratic congresswomen of color, George Conway called Trump a “racist president.”
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