Where A Con Will, There's A Conway
George Conway quotedtweeted Kellyanne Conway today, to make a fairly banal slam/rejoinder on her tweet.
It's not that incisive or original, and not that different from several other tweets dunking on the same one.
The only reason that anyone is talking about it, of course, is that the Conways are married... and according to their previous public statements on the subject, happily so. Plenty of people are willing to believe that, even if they believe nothing else about the Conways. It's a two-person con. George takes potshots at Donald while Kellyanne draws a full-time salary for doing little more than massaging his ego. Meanwhile, he gets to help the Federalist Society pick judges for Trump to appoint while she gets all kinds of juicy insider information they can both use.
Then, whenever the tides of tilting fortune turn to favor one side completely -- when Trump is defeated, or his ascendancy seems complete -- the couple can "reconcile" and reveal that they were both on the side of Good (i.e., the victorious side) all along.
According to one version of this theory, if Trump fail they will reveal that they are collectively the Anonymous who penned the op-ed and tell-little book from inside the Trump regime.
I have to confess, at the risk of dinging my reputation as an analytical mind, but I'm utterly lost at why people are so fixated on the idea that they wrote the book together. It's not that I trust anyone who would do something so nakedly self-serving as writing a backside-covering memoir while they continue to work for a fascist con man to tell the truth, but why would an inside account require an outsider's point of view? What would George be adding to the process? If it turns out to be Kellyanne's handiwork, then sure, I expect to learn he knew about it, beta read it, served as a sounding board, etc. I will not be surprised if he helped in the way a spouse often helps with a big project.
I just don't get why it's impossible to discuss the likelihood of Kellyanne Conway having written it without someone chiming in "I think they wrote it together." Is it because "they're in it together" seems obvious in a general sense? Or is it a belief that Kellyanne Conway couldn't have written it herself? Because I have to say first of all that she's a skilled communicator in her own right, and second of all it's not super well written. It was obviously churned out in a hurry.
Anyway. At the end of the day... I don't actually care. I would like to know who wrote A Warning but not because it will change anything. Whoever wrote it is complicit in the crimes of the Trump family and has done absolutely nothing to make amends. I would love for whatever specific game the Conways are playing to be exposed now, when exposure has the most chance to end the game and hurt their standing in the world... but I don't actually care that much what their plans are. I don't trust them. Knowing what they're doing won't make me trust them more and not knowing doesn't leave me in danger of trusting them.
There's a danger when dealing with the serial liars of the Trump regime and our post-truth Republican Party generally that we just become too fatigued by the constant lies and we don't know what to believe or disbelieve. I don't have a simple solution to a lot of things, but in this case, the cure is simple: stop caring about the possibility that George or Kellyanne or Donald or any of them might be telling the truth. They're all the boys crying wolf, and we don't owe it to any of them to credit anything they say as being potentially sincere.
George and Kellyanne may have started out with a plan to play both sides that has turned into a real schism as the stress of public sniping piles up. Or if that hasn't happened, it may yet. Or it may never have been anything but real, but Kellyanne Conway was never actually a Trump loyalist (she's a hired gun who changed horses mid-race) and George Conway has been working with Trump's people on judicial appointments. It's all an illusion. Even the true parts are incidentally true, and exist in service of lies.
When Trump puts out a flurry of economic figures, it's not that I immediately know that every single one of them is false. I do know he's a liar. I do know that he places no special value on the truth, that he'll treat anything that's good for him as true, that he'll lie even when the facts are on his side if he thinks the facts can be improved.
And I know that contrary to his frequent refrain, whether he is impeached and removed (or investigated, or indicted) does not and must not hinge on whatever job performance numbers he can throw up on Twitter. Accurate numbers are important for making decisions, but right now the people making the decisions are the same people who throw numbers around as a smokescreen.
There are a lot of things we won't know the true shape of unless and until Donald Trump is out of office and the party that enables him is out of power. Until then, it matters more to know that he and the people around him aren't trustworthy than it does to know exactly what the truth is about all the stories they tell and all the games they play.
Let them cry.
And when the wolf comes, let it come for all of them.
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