At the celebration that followed the Catholic ceremony at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, the wedding cake was so large that it had to be broken into pieces to get it through the door. This was one of the details that the press told about the pompous wedding ceremony, in April 2001, between the former campaign manager and presidential adviser to Donald Trump, Kellyanne Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, by her maiden name, and the influential conservative lawyer and later a hypercritical dissenter of the Republican leader, George T. Conway III.
Twenty-two years and numerous public disputes later, the couple has just announced their legal separation through a joint statement with what are surely the kindest phrases they have shared since, in 2017, they began to throw things at each other’s heads. A little edifying struggle that was aired on social networks, the media and in the book that, last year, she dedicated to a large extent to unleash her grudges, Here’s the deal: a memoir.
“We are in the final stages of an amicable divorce. We have been married for more than two decades. We appreciate the many happy years we have shared, and most of all, our four amazing children, who continue to be the heartbeat of our family and our top priority,” the Conways wrote in their note.
The “happy years” must have been the ones before the offensive that, especially via Twitter, George Conway launched against his wife’s boss a year after she arrived at the White House at the hands of the president… And vice versa.
Two months earlier, when Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election became official, George Conway broke down in tears, according to witnesses at the scene. And, alluding to the role played by his wife, he told everyone with him at the Midtown Manhattan Hilton: “She has done it! She has made history!”
After getting married in 2001, the Conways had gone to live in New York’s Trump World Tower. At a condominium meeting, he argued against the proposal to remove the owner’s last name from the huge exterior sign of the building. The tycoon and future president of the country liked that so much that he called the lawyer to propose a position on the condominium board. He refused, but she accepted. And that was how she established direct contact with what would be his boss and president of the nation.
“My laziness led her to meet Donald Trump,” the husband would say years later. “Knowing what I know now, I never would have mentioned the proposal to that meeting when I got home,” she added.
When Trump won in 2016 and she was hired as a presidential adviser, the couple logically moved to Washington DC; Specifically, a 1,400-square-meter mansion on the luxurious Embassy Row avenue, a house valued at eight million euros. And soon, according to information at the time, Trump included the lawyer among the candidates to head the civil division of the Department of Justice. But he rejected the offer. He did so in light of the president’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey just as the federal agency’s investigations into Russian election interference were gaining ground. The pretext was that Comey had irregularly filed the case of emails with confidential information from Hillary Clinton.
Thereafter, Conway was fully engaged in his public criticism of Trump. In one tweet he called his hiring and firing “absurd” and in another he judged his statements “false and misleading.”
In August 2018, Kellyanne Conway lashed out at her husband in an interview with The Washington Post. The presidential adviser considered the lawyer’s messages against her boss as disrespectful towards her. “I think they are disrespectful to his wife,” she said.
The now regular commentator on Fox added that day: “I feel like there’s a part of George that thinks I chose Donald Trump over him, which is ridiculous. One is my job and the other is my marriage,” she noted. And she did not stop emphasizing who was who and what they owed to each other within the couple: “Nobody knows who I am because of my husband,” she said, adding: “People know my husband thanks to me.”
The escalation of mutual attacks between the spouses, with a triangular extension to the former president, could only lead to the point that it reached last weekend with the announcement of the break.
Trump was quick to react to the news: “Congratulations to Kellyanne Conway on her divorce from her crazy husband. She has finally gotten rid of the disgusting ballast around her neck,” he wrote on his Truth Social network.
A cake broken into pieces.