In 2015, Kellyanne Conway found herself en route to pick up her kids at elementary school, simultaneously pushing back against an attempt by Michael Cohen — then Donald Trump’s personal attorney and fixer — to rig the annual Conservative Political Action Conference’s buzzy straw poll, which her firm was running, in Trump’s favor.
“ ‘Mr. Trump’ needed to come in first in the PAC straw poll,” Conway recounted that Cohen told her in a phone call. “He repeated himself. Mr. Trump needed to come in first.”
Four years later, firmly ensconced in the White House as senior counselor to Trump as president, Conway said she found herself again facing the surreal, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka handed her a Post-it note with “the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy.”
The marriage between Conway and her husband had erupted into public view when George T. Conway III began attacking Trump on Twitter, and Conway said Ivanka was responding to her own openness about seeking professional support.
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“I noticed she had avoided putting that in a text or an email. I appreciated the information and her thoughtfulness and wanted to pursue it,” Conway recalled. “After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘okay’ to the other while looking at his phone. We never went.”
These scenes and others are part of Conway’s nearly 500-page new memoir, “Here’s the Deal,” which The Washington Post obtained in advance of its Tuesday publication.
Part personal chronicle and part political journey, Conway’s book is filled with the sorts of barbed one-liners and bon mots that she dispensed on cable news on Trump’s behalf, becoming — depending on one’s perspective — increasingly famous or infamous.
Unlike many other Trump-focused tomes in the post-presidency era, Conway has not set out to pen a scathing tell-all, in which she distances herself from the president or administration she once served.
Her memoir is peppered with references to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — a term she uses to refer to the media and the political left, who she says were unable to accept the reality that Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton in 2016. Conway is also among the relatively small group of staffers who managed to leave the White House still in Trump’s inner circle.
Her book walks a similar line, offering what she views as a candid assessment of some of her colleagues in the White House and the media — both positive and negative — but never skewering Trump himself.
Conway reserves some of her harshest criticism for Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and a Trump senior adviser, whom she describes as “shrewd and calculating”; “a man of knowing nods, quizzical looks, and sidebar inquiries”; and someone who, as the president’s son-in-law, knew that “no matter how disastrous a personnel change or legislative attempt may be, he was unlikely to be held accountable for it.”
“There was no subject he considered beyond his expertise. Criminal justice reform. Middle East peace. The southern and northern borders. Veterans and opioids. Big Tech and small business,” she writes. “If Martian attacks had come across the radar, he would have happily added them to his ever-bulging portfolio. He’d have made sure you knew he’d exiled the Martians to Uranus and insisted he did not care who got credit for it. He misread the Constitution in one crucial respect, thinking that all power not given to the federal government was reserved to him.”
As an example of what she calls Kushner’s “schemes and dreams,” she later in the book recounts a scuttled immigration rollout plan in which Kushner suggested Trump “go to Ellis Island, where he’d stand at the foot of the Statue of Liberty to lead a naturalization ceremony.”
Conway says that her tension with Kushner came, in part, because he accused her of leaking to the media as a way to undermine her credibility with Trump — a charge she denies.
A Kushner ally said his portfolio included some of the administration’s biggest successes: a criminal justice reform bill, the USMCA trade deal, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and the Operation Warp Speed coronavirus vaccine effort.
What the May 17 primaries reveal about the future of Trumpism
The Post’s Annie Linskey discusses former president Donald Trump’s uneven influence across key primary races on May 17. (Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)
Conway also takes fleeting aim at Paul Manafort, the short-lived chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort, she writes, “literally fell asleep during my PowerPoint on how to close the gender gap with Hillary. (He must have been on Ukraine time.).”
And Conway describes Reince Priebus, the former chair of the Republican National Committee who served as Trump’s first chief of staff, as “thoroughly conservative but not remotely MAGA,” a reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan.
Conway depicts Priebus as fundamentally not understanding the Trump movement; when Conway pressed a skeptical Priebus to allow a number of administration officials to address CPAC, the annual conservative gathering, he told her, “That’s because you love the crazies, Kellyanne, and they love you,” she writes.
Priebus had spoken at CPAC almost every year since becoming RNC chair, including in 2017, when he and Stephen K. Bannon, a former top Trump adviser, addressed the gathering together. Priebus declined to comment.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Nov. 22, 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
She also pulls no punches against much of the Trump White House’s team of coronavirus experts — particularly Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — whom she depicts as slow to comprehend the magnitude of the virus in its early days, as well as donning masks in public but not always in private.
“No masks was standard fare in the White House Situation Room, where Dr. Fauci was more likely to wear ‘Dr. Fauci’ socks than a mask,” she writes. “Then, like magic, when D. Myles Cullen, the vice president’s photographer, came into the room, masks would suddenly appear.”
Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.
“Democracy will survive. America will survive,” she writes. “George and I may not survive.”
“ ‘Mr. Trump’ needed to come in first in the PAC straw poll,” Conway recounted that Cohen told her in a phone call. “He repeated himself. Mr. Trump needed to come in first.”
Four years later, firmly ensconced in the White House as senior counselor to Trump as president, Conway said she found herself again facing the surreal, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka handed her a Post-it note with “the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy.”
The marriage between Conway and her husband had erupted into public view when George T. Conway III began attacking Trump on Twitter, and Conway said Ivanka was responding to her own openness about seeking professional support.
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“I noticed she had avoided putting that in a text or an email. I appreciated the information and her thoughtfulness and wanted to pursue it,” Conway recalled. “After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘okay’ to the other while looking at his phone. We never went.”
These scenes and others are part of Conway’s nearly 500-page new memoir, “Here’s the Deal,” which The Washington Post obtained in advance of its Tuesday publication.
Part personal chronicle and part political journey, Conway’s book is filled with the sorts of barbed one-liners and bon mots that she dispensed on cable news on Trump’s behalf, becoming — depending on one’s perspective — increasingly famous or infamous.
Unlike many other Trump-focused tomes in the post-presidency era, Conway has not set out to pen a scathing tell-all, in which she distances herself from the president or administration she once served.
Her memoir is peppered with references to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — a term she uses to refer to the media and the political left, who she says were unable to accept the reality that Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton in 2016. Conway is also among the relatively small group of staffers who managed to leave the White House still in Trump’s inner circle.
Her book walks a similar line, offering what she views as a candid assessment of some of her colleagues in the White House and the media — both positive and negative — but never skewering Trump himself.
Conway reserves some of her harshest criticism for Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and a Trump senior adviser, whom she describes as “shrewd and calculating”; “a man of knowing nods, quizzical looks, and sidebar inquiries”; and someone who, as the president’s son-in-law, knew that “no matter how disastrous a personnel change or legislative attempt may be, he was unlikely to be held accountable for it.”
“There was no subject he considered beyond his expertise. Criminal justice reform. Middle East peace. The southern and northern borders. Veterans and opioids. Big Tech and small business,” she writes. “If Martian attacks had come across the radar, he would have happily added them to his ever-bulging portfolio. He’d have made sure you knew he’d exiled the Martians to Uranus and insisted he did not care who got credit for it. He misread the Constitution in one crucial respect, thinking that all power not given to the federal government was reserved to him.”
As an example of what she calls Kushner’s “schemes and dreams,” she later in the book recounts a scuttled immigration rollout plan in which Kushner suggested Trump “go to Ellis Island, where he’d stand at the foot of the Statue of Liberty to lead a naturalization ceremony.”
Conway says that her tension with Kushner came, in part, because he accused her of leaking to the media as a way to undermine her credibility with Trump — a charge she denies.
A Kushner ally said his portfolio included some of the administration’s biggest successes: a criminal justice reform bill, the USMCA trade deal, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and the Operation Warp Speed coronavirus vaccine effort.
What the May 17 primaries reveal about the future of Trumpism
The Post’s Annie Linskey discusses former president Donald Trump’s uneven influence across key primary races on May 17. (Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)
Conway also takes fleeting aim at Paul Manafort, the short-lived chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort, she writes, “literally fell asleep during my PowerPoint on how to close the gender gap with Hillary. (He must have been on Ukraine time.).”
And Conway describes Reince Priebus, the former chair of the Republican National Committee who served as Trump’s first chief of staff, as “thoroughly conservative but not remotely MAGA,” a reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan.
Conway depicts Priebus as fundamentally not understanding the Trump movement; when Conway pressed a skeptical Priebus to allow a number of administration officials to address CPAC, the annual conservative gathering, he told her, “That’s because you love the crazies, Kellyanne, and they love you,” she writes.
Priebus had spoken at CPAC almost every year since becoming RNC chair, including in 2017, when he and Stephen K. Bannon, a former top Trump adviser, addressed the gathering together. Priebus declined to comment.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Nov. 22, 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
She also pulls no punches against much of the Trump White House’s team of coronavirus experts — particularly Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — whom she depicts as slow to comprehend the magnitude of the virus in its early days, as well as donning masks in public but not always in private.
“No masks was standard fare in the White House Situation Room, where Dr. Fauci was more likely to wear ‘Dr. Fauci’ socks than a mask,” she writes. “Then, like magic, when D. Myles Cullen, the vice president’s photographer, came into the room, masks would suddenly appear.”
Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.
“Democracy will survive. America will survive,” she writes. “George and I may not survive.”
