Here's the Deal, page 41
Even if it improved her mood, or improved The View’s ratings, to hurl invective my way with no opportunity to respond, why lie?
Maybe she was too young to remember when, a decade earlier, I was on CNN’s Larry King Live in late February 2008, forty-one years old and nearly nine months pregnant with my third child, to defend her father after the New York Times ran a specious front-page piece linking Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain and an attractive female lobbyist, Vicki Iseman.
I was outraged for the McCains. Senator McCain unwisely instructed everyone to stop talking about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the controversial anti-Semitic 9/11 truther who just happened to be Obama’s pastor of many, many years, who had married Barack and Michelle and who had baptized their daughters. Even Obama was forced to deliver the famous “race speech” in Philadelphia in March 2008 in part because of these disturbing revelations. McCain thought he took the high road, only to have the Times and others pull his name into the gutter with stories like this one. I went to the mat for Senator McCain that night and throughout the election cycle.
Years later, I quietly paid my respects to her late father at the U.S. Capitol in 2018 and was among the first White House officials to publicly acknowledge his death and his service to the nation. I don’t recall judging or begrudging Meghan McCain when, like John’s unsuccessful presidential campaign consultants, it looked like to me she cashed in on her father’s two defeats for president with books like America, You Sexy Bitch or Dirty Sexy Politics. She had been born to a famous father and a rich mother, so her path to power was a hop, a skip, and a jump. Her ad nauseam, ad hominem attacks on me were uncool and unprovoked.
Like many know-it-alls, she knew nothing about me, and perhaps even less about herself. You would think someone who so easily falls apart when challenged would show a little grace to others when their own ride got a little rocky. I was reminded of this when McCain herself could not take what she dishes out, following a tough exchange with co-host Joy Behar, she recalled (in an interview): “She’s [Joy] supposed to be my friend, and it’s supposed to be a sisterhood.” McCain added. “I’ll never forget. I went back to my office and I had a panic attack. I was crying. I was hyperventilating. I threw up.”
The couples dinner never happened. One half of the two couples had conversed, though. I had run into Meghan McCain’s husband a few times, including on the set of Face the Nation and at an Axios party, and I had known his father, Doug Domenech, years earlier as part of the conservative movement. Ben is very smart, good on TV, and as head of The Federalist, lived and worked close to where he’d been raised in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. The Federalist was known for hiring young, beautiful, thin conservative women. One such mini-entourage surrounded him at an Axios event, where I had stopped on my way to a live hit with Laura Ingraham. In making polite conversation, I acknowledged his wife’s fairly new gig at ABC in New York and said soothingly, “George and I did the commuting thing between Washington and New York when we were first married, just like you’ll do now, with your wife up in New York on The View. It works out, you just—”
“Meghan McCain’s husband” interrupted me with a smile. “The View is the worst show on television.”
* * *
DECEMBER 17, 2019, began like most other days. I was gulping coffee and print news, abbreviating a workout, helping the kids, dogs, and my mom start their days, then dashing to the office. Three days before the start of winter, it was cold enough for me to move a morning TV interview inside to the White House Press Briefing Room. Amid the morning’s cheerful chaos, and with a week to go until I’d be hosting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at our house (Santa, this year you’d better be real), my mind was full.
I had spoken with the president and had checked in with colleagues. But I hadn’t yet managed to absorb clearly and completely the latest surprise from George.
For twenty years, those surprises had included romantic gifts, thoughtful gestures, and creative trips. The Concorde to Barbados. Australia for my thirty-fifth birthday. Budding romantic but not yet boyfriend George waiting in seat 4A on my connecting flight from Dallas to Tucson as I slid into seat 4B and the cabin erupted in champagne-fueled applause.
Lately, the surprises had come in the form of tweets and op-eds meant to malign my boss and, I hated to admit, to wound me. They came without warning or advance notice or even the simplest courtesy a husband might normally give his wife of decades and the mother of his four children. I learned about these little surprises and read them when the whole world did, or in too many cases, well afterward. While I was doing dishes or helping with homework, he was tucked away conspiring and typing, choosing those who were using him over those who loved him.
That morning, the New York Times had an op-ed headlined “We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated.” The authors were George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson. It read like a free and fawning press release, announcing a new group called the “Lincoln Project.”
I knew these other men: three Republican political consultants who were lately long on TV appearances and short on actual victories. George knew them only by “reputation,” and he’d never been a huge admirer of the unregulated, unaccountable political consultancy. The three consultants all had something important in common: None of them had ever successfully managed a presidential campaign, though some of them (including Schmidt with McCain and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz; and another “cofounder,” Stuart Stevens, who was Romney’s honcho in the embarrassing 2012 loss to Barack Obama) had tried.
As was custom after I’d finish a television interview, I took questions from the press in an unscripted gaggle that would go on for at least twenty minutes—no notes and no net. The president was increasingly dissatisfied with the press shop I had avoided running three years earlier, so there I was. In a few days, President Trump would be impeached in the House for the first time. So I was expecting most of the questions I got.
But twenty-nine minutes into the gaggle, a reporter in the back asked me if I had any reaction to “this super PAC funded by or started by your husband, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson.”
Off the cuff, I responded, “Oh, those presidential campaign managers who failed? Who never got where I got?”
As that landed, I continued: “I don’t really have a reaction except to say the New York Times seems overjoyed every time they can write a puff piece that includes certain people’s names. They covered some group last year [Checks and Balances] that hasn’t really taken off. They covered some Republican primary opponent [Joe Walsh] of the president that none of you give the time of day to anymore, I noticed.
“It’s kind of disappointing to see some of the people involved, but not surprising.”
Just two years earlier, George and I had sat alongside the president and First Lady for an intimate Christmas dinner with White House senior staff and spouses that he thoroughly enjoyed. Now he was in cahoots with overrated, underachieving men who had ridiculed and dismissed me for years, all for the purpose of defeating Donald Trump.
There was just one big problem in the formation of this new group: George wanted to make noise. These other guys wanted to make money. George may have been placing principle before profit, but there’s no way they were, I thought.
* * *
IT WAS TRULY amazing, I came to see, how many Americans, including Hollywood figures, media stars, and loads of bored, unhappy, anonymous people, practically live on Twitter and its other social media cousins. I regretted that my own husband had become one of them. From zero tweets in 2016 to a total of 80,000 by the end of 2020, George had narrowed much of our once full and happy life into tiny Twitter tirades.
But it wasn’t only social media dragging the country down this hole. The nation’s major newspapers and cable and network TV were certainly doing their part, and so was late-night TV, trying to divide George from me and me from Trump, just as sure as red states were different from blue. They shape-shifted George into whatever they needed him to be to fit or generate a story. The New York Times mentioned George in roughly forty-eight articles over a period of three and a half years. In forty-five of those forty-eight articles, the paper referred to George as my husband. The Washington Post followed suit. Of the 191 times he was mentioned in that paper, he was described as my husband 165 times. Other times he simply relied on his byline as a Washington Post “Contributing Columnist.”
When I appeared on CNN, I was often asked about my husband but not about my work. Meanwhile, George, who was unemployed through much of this, was asked about “his work” and not his wife. I asked myself again: Where are the feminists who should be objecting to this? Especially when I was working in the White House and George was not working anywhere.
The secrecy and duplicity stung.
If George was proud of his new role as a constitutional scholar/campaign strategist/psychoanalyst/columnist/TV pundit, why not just own it? Why not discuss any of it with me? Instead, I kept discovering the latest op-eds and TV appearances along with the rest of the world. Now here was my own husband, taking up with the same men who had excluded me and then underperformed me. This whole Lincoln Project thing seemed an odd fit for George. This brilliant man and accomplished lawyer had gone from working with legal legends like Marty Lipton and Herb Wachtell to fronting for grifters and gadflies.
Increasingly, reporters revealing their biases and weird but also twisted people online seemed to take sick pleasure in thinking George’s tweets were hurting me or bothering the president. George, in return, gave way too much to those strangers and wallowed in the attention. I read many of these for the first time long after I left the White House. A thrill for online weirdos who pretend they know George and have a relationship with him; a chill for those who actually do know him and do have a relationship with him.
The sheer amount of time George spent tweeting was alarming. Each day I got myself ready for work and my kids ready for school while George cozied up with Twitter. It became obsessive, escalating from a few legal observations or corgi memes, to defending me, Brett Kavanaugh, and Attorney General Barr, to becoming an unqualified yet unbridled psychiatrist offering diagnoses and an armchair critic hurling insults. The volume was alarming, but what concerned me most was how all-consuming it had become. Feeding the beast and one-upping one’s last outlandish or outrageous post is central to gathering a following online. Like too many who slip into that vortex, George eagerly complied. George’s newfound allies in the media and the odd collection of has-beens and never-will-bes in NYC and D.C. who would invite him to their homes and exclusive meetings began to take precedence over his family.
George got very personal and mean. I strived each day to keep our family together and happy, to try to keep him involved in the daily drumbeat of our lives and included in the major decisions and events. He returned the favor by attacking my boss and my colleagues. A sampling of tweets:
Turned pollster: “And not only is he under 50 in PA, MI, WI (3 states he won by a total of 77,774 votes), he’s under 50 in TX and LA (which he won by 10 and 20 percent), and in others he must win like FL, NC, GA, IN, OH, AZ. This even though the strong economy he inherited remains strong (for now).”
Turned doctor: “We have an incoherent president who’s off his rocker, and this is what we’re talking about? Seriously?”
Some tweets are laugh-out-loud ironic and delicious, given now-President Biden’s incoherence, obvious physical infirmities, and polls that show a majority of Americans say he is “not up to the job” and “mentally unfit.”
“Are we ready yet to have a full national conversation about the diseased mental state of the president of the United States?”
“The media and the political establishment need to start asking the question: is @realdonaldtrump’s disordered mind spiraling psychosis? Has it already?”
People who had known George for years, some even longer than I had known him, registered their concerns. Their own politics ran the spectrum from full-blown MAGA to unrelenting progressives to proudly apolitical, but all of them were worried about me and then the kids. They simply did not recognize Tweeting George, characterizing his conduct on a spectrum from inexplicable to reprehensible. I found myself reflexively defending George at first: “he also tweets about the Philadelphia Eagles and Corgis,” “he’s allowed to have his own opinion,” and the most ironic one, “George never cared for all of Trump’s tweeting, I suppose.…” I was in denial. I literally did not want to see what was in front of me.
Explaining to someone why he tweets: “My thoughts are: I suspect—just to pick two distinctions at random—that your candidate didn’t (1) show signs of serious mental instability and (2) have command over the world’s second-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Am I right?”
Turned political analyst: “Harris would annihilate Trump.”
Discussing allegations against the president: “Everyone should listen to this. It’s unpleasant. But please do. It’s important. Please retweet it. And please email it to as many people as you can. Please.”
“The Liar-in-Chief and his lieutenant liars love to falsely accuse other people of lying even when overwhelmingly evidence corroborates the truthfulness of the person they are lying about.”
Followers aren’t friends, “likes” on Twitter aren’t love in real life, yet it seemed that this was the affection and attention my husband craved. I was more numb than mad; and if I was mad, it was overtaken by sad.
Turned personal: “No one needs him. It’s just that some people haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Why people persist in trashing their own personal and professional reputations for @realdonaldtrump utterly escapes me.”
Aged well: “I was never a fan of @NYGovCuomo. But he’s doing a terrific job with these presentations. Imagine how much better off the country would be if @realdonaldtrump had just one-quarter of Cuomo’s clear-mindedness and honesty.”
Exactly no one—beginning with me—objected to George’s about-face on Trump, even if I did not understand it. George was free to have opinions, even ones that were at odds with those he’d held just a short time before. The perplexing and vexing part was how public he was with those differences of opinion, how aggressive, how incessant. This was so out of character for George: the name-calling, the spitefulness, the passive-aggressive nature. Some were so shocked, they nervously asked if he and I had some plan, as if I’d be in on a ruse to let loose on the president “and the people around him.” “This is all for show,” people would write. All silly. If this were a show, I wanted no part in it, literally. Cancel the rest of the season—please!
Sharing a Lincoln Project post predicting Joe Biden would get 443 electoral votes: “This would be the biggest electoral college defeat of a sitting president since 1980.”
Sharing false stories (still posted): “The Russia-bounty story is as huge a presidential scandal as there can be. It’s an order of magnitude more outrageous than what he got impeached for, even though the Ukraine scandal was plainly criminal from the beginning. And it’s clearly not going away.”
Tagging the president in tweets suggested that George had become one of those many people who had convinced themselves that the president and he were the same: I have a Twitter feed, too! Except they weren’t like him. One was the president, with the weight of the world and its chaotic, uncertain challenges on his shoulders. Trump was too busy and too uninterested to notice every comment or commentator. George is a smart man who must have recognized this. So if he wasn’t trying to hurt or embarrass Donald Trump, or drive him out of the White House, then who was his intended target?
It felt that George was moralizing while violating his marital vows to love, honor, and respect: “No one is compelled to work for, speak for, defend, explain, rationalize, or excuse this president and his incompetence, derangement, and racism. Whether to do any of that, or not, is a choice. And it’s a moral choice, a crucial one, both for individuals and the nation.”
As time went on, George and I barely spoke about Trump or politics.
* * *
IN THE OVEN-TO-TABLE format of Twitter-to-TV, the media kept generating content and generating eyeballs for themselves. This will fluster her! Let’s do more Conway stories! I wasn’t mad. Mad? I was sad. This was my marriage, my children, and my life. I’d kept it private for years. As had George. Now the brilliant man I respected for so many reasons, including how he kept his own counsel, was sending more than a hundred tweets a day, attacking my boss and the very things I had worked on, more clickbait grist for the media mill and connection for quite a few lonely, unhappily married, never married, or no longer married women developing unhealthy crushes on the man behind the tweet button. They could make George whatever they wanted or needed. I just wanted the old George, the loving husband and father who did not fritter away the day in an online abyss about the same stuff over and over.
Reporters who had gone out of their way to question me about George in unkind ways were now jumping to claim him as their own. In this crazy club, they all joined together in a circle of jerky mutual praise, tweeting, retweeting, insulting, and instigating.
President Trump was impeached before Christmas by a myopic, partisan Democrat House majority over his phone call with the Ukrainian president. Trump had flippantly described the phone call as “perfect,” and the Democrats had foolishly treated it like the end of the world.
At least 2020 had finally arrived. Peace and prosperity abounded. My children were thriving. The elders in my life were healthy. And the president was poised for reelection.
What could possibly go wrong?
Part VII
Year from Hell
