The fight between George Conway and Donald Trump is getting nutty. ‘You. Are. Nuts.’, Conway tweeted this morning about the commander-in-chief who also happens to be the employer of his wife, Kellyanne, Trump’s unflinching defender. Earlier this morning, the president tweeted, ‘George Conway, often referred to as Mr Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!’
The President of the United States. https://t.co/ZSpb3UXVPC
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 20, 2019
If anything, Conway should feel flattered. This may be one of the few times that anyone has been able to prompt Trump to rush to defend female virtue and demand, in effect, uxorious behavior. It’s also the case that he reserves the term ‘stone cold’ for his greatest objects of ire. He has thus described members of MS-13 as ‘stone cold vicious killers.’ When Gov. Gavin Newsom of California recently announced that he would issue an executive order that would reprieve 737 inmates on death row, Trump responded, ‘Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!’
Trump’s obsession with the phrase ‘stone cold’ is not difficult to trace. The origins of the ‘stone cold’ derive, I suspect, from 2007, when Trump participated in WWE’s Wrestlemania 23 competition. WWE head honcho Vince McMahon quickly divined that Trump was game for the Stone Cold Stunner. The move, which usually involves a ¾ facelock jawbreaker, was administered to him by Stone Cold Steve Austin. Trump took a shot in the gut, collapsed like a sack of potatoes and, et voila, the crowd went nuts, as it were.
So has Trump succeeded in abashing George Conway? Kellyanne says she doesn’t want to get involved in the dispute. She snippily commented that she had four children to get ready for school and might not be up on all the latest details, signifying perhaps that her husband was leaving her in the lurch by not picking up his share of the family household duties even as he indulged in mano-a-mano combat with Trump. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Kellyanne teed off on her husband at a British embassy part for members of Congress a month ago: ‘Conway told the group that she and the president think her husband is jealous of her, and that the president has kept her at a prominent place in the administration because he trusts her and wants to “protect her”…Kellyanne Conway said that George Conway preferred to spend his time in front of his computer, while she preferred to socialize, the attendees said. She said it was the fault of the news media for giving her husband such a platform, and that some of George Conway’s close friends had asked him to stop.’
The spat was triggered by Conway’s claims that Trump is showing increasing signs of going bonkers after he issued 50 tweets this past weekend denouncing everything from John McCain to the Mueller investigation. ‘His condition is getting worse,’ wrote Conway. As CNN notes, Trump has wholly plausible reasons for flipping out. His sordid past is catching up to him. It turns out that Rod Rosenstein is camping out at the Justice Department to help absorb any fallout from the Mueller investigation. The federal warrants that were unsealed yesterday include 19 pages that are blacked out bearing the title ‘The Illegal Campaign Contribution Schemes.’ Meanwhile, Tom Barrack, the head of the Trump inaugural committee, and Steve Bannon are both cooperating with the House Judiciary Committee. Soon Trump may find himself longing for the days when the worst he had to absorb was the Stone Cold Stunner.
