George Conway, conservative attorney and hubby of the infamous Kellyanne, chats in a new interview that’s well worth reading – especially for prognostications like this: “Trump could easily be under both federal and state indictment at some point between Election Day and New Year’s Day…In all likelihood, he will be convicted of multiple felonies.”
But one particular passage made me wince:
“Reflecting on my own behavior, I thoroughly own up to the fact that I voted for Donald Trump and supported him in 2016…I engaged in wishful thinking. I truly thought that once Trump was president he would have some type of realization or epiphany about what that responsibility meant. I really thought that Trump would become a better person.”
Conway is to be heartily commended for his relentless eviscerations of Trump…post-2016. But hang on a sec: Did he really think that a life-long grifter would be capable of scrapping his dirtbag personality just by wrapping himself in the majesty of the presidency? Was Conway truly unaware that humans don’t change overnight? Had he never heard the warning, best expressed by Maya Angelou, that “when people show you who they are, believe them the first time”?
Apparently, even yours truly was a better judge of character than Conway – because I listed Trump’s malignantly narcissistic symptoms in a column way back in May ’16. Trump’s permanently damaged personality was surely obvious to anyone not deaf, dumb, or blind. And I guess I was more enlightened than Conway when I noted a month before the election that Trump was “a clear and present danger to our democratic values.”
I suppose that Conway’s need to be loyal to his wife (who was finally in the loop after long years of Republican service) ultimately trumped the mountain of evidence that Trump was one sick puppy. For starters, apparently Conway didn’t see, or chose not to heed, the investigative journalist (and former colleague of mine) who wrote at length, in the spring of 16, about Trump’s “multiple threads” to organized crime: “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.”
And apparently, in ’16, Conway didn’t see, or chose not to notice, Trump’s racist attack on an Indiana-born judge with Mexican ancestry who’d ruled against Trump University; Trump’s incitements of violence (“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell…”); his blatant lies about rival Republicans (like the smear that Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald”); his plea for more hacking of Hillary Clinton (“Russia, if you’re listening…”); his refusal to release his tax returns, breaking a 40-year candidate tradition (“I think people don’t care”); his boasts about not paying his fair share of federal taxes (“that makes me smart”); his grab-’em-by-the-pussy remarks (“this was locker room banter, a private conversation”); his baseless attacks on the credibility of the election (“I’m afraid the election is gonna be rigged”); his advance warning that he might not accept the results if he lost (“I’ll keep you in suspense OK?”); his remark, during a debate with Hillary, that if he was running law enforcement, “You’d be in jail.”
It was all there, out in the open, same as he ever was. Maggie Haberman, the journalist who has covered Trump longer than anyone else, writes in her new book that he “has had only a handful of moves throughout his entire adult life. There is the counterattack, there is the quick lie, there is the shift of blame, there is the distraction or misdirection, there is the outburst of rage, there is the performative anger, there is the designed-just-for-headlines action or claim…”
George Conway says in his new interview that he ignored all such pre-election evidence because “I was engaging in wishful thinking, and by doing that I was projecting my idealistic values about patriotism and love of country and selflessness onto Trump, who will never comprehend these values.”
He does deserve a few props for ‘fessing up. And I partly endorse his broader argument:
“One of the problems right now on the left – and I understand the root of the sentiment – is that when a Republican or someone else on the right finally sees the light about Trump, there is a tendency to call them hypocrites, to attack them for supporting Trump and being a Republican…But when people see the light, you have to encourage them. You don’t have to give them a pass for what they did in the past, but you should praise them for doing the right thing now by standing up against Trump and what he represents.”
OK, fine. Some praise is due. But if people like Conway hadn’t so thoroughly fooled themselves prior to the ’16 election, rendering themselves deaf to the clanging alarm bells – indeed, if they hadn’t behaved like so many prominent Germans did prior to 1933, telling themselves that Adolf would mature in office – then today Trump and his termites would not be gnawing away at our democratic foundation.