Why George and Kellyanne Conway matter

I'm loath to diagnose the marriage between Trump ass-licker and "alternative facts" maven Kellyanne Conway and her husband, Trump-hater and Bret Kavanaugh faffer George, but boy howdy, this tweet is something else.

Over the past few months, George has intimated sideswipes at his wife, but never anything overt. That went out the window yesterday with this tweet. He's never addressed Kellyanne directly for her work with the man he hates—a man he hates even though he's providing him with a sexual frisson of hard-right judges he adores appointed to the bench. But every man has his breaking point, and maybe George has reached his.

Now, to be frank, I don't care whether or not this is an act. I'm of the opinion that this marital contretemps is real; no one can simulate this well.

What interests me is that even in this rock-ribbed conservative family, Donald Trump is wreaking havoc.

One would think that George would be over the moon with Trump's choices and actions. But it's almost as if he wants to win the conservative argument on its merits, not as a result of a cult of personality. Yes, he's getting the judges he's always dreamt of. Every item on the laundry list which the Federalist Society has had over the decades is being checked off. But, and again I can only go by his public pronouncements, it all sits in his mouth like ash, the taste of the great conservative hecatomb disgusting him.

Maybe it's because he sees that what Trump has wrought is unsustainable. The Trump Revolution lasted just the election season of 2016; what it has engendered is fierce resistance among the 60-65% of the populace which looks aghast at what he's doing, and steeling their resolve to stand against and vote against anything which has a hint of "conservatism". Trump has defined conservatism as his movement. It's no longer what George Conway has always argued it meant. (Which, let's be honest, was pretty crappy as well. Conservatism, if it ever had honor, lost it sometime between the pre-war Bund rallies and McCarthyism.)

George is no fool. He would have been happy with a Trump-like figure were he at all not a louche real-estate conman with mafia connections from Jamaica, Queens. If Trump had an ounce of the political acumen which Ronald Reagan had, and was pushing the same Trumpian policies, George would be having frabjous days. He would be getting what he would think would be a sustainable conservative ascendancy, without the organized blowback.

Of course, the problem is that he'd be wrong anyway. Maybe it would take longer, but blowback there would be as rights were rolled back. We're fortunate that Trump is such an incoherent imbecile that he's laid bare the nostrums of conservatism like a fat septuagenarian at a nudist resort. He is discrediting the conservative project with every action, with every utterance, with every tweet. George may hate Trump, but is it hatred because he's destroying conservatism from within? I think so. 

The fact is that George will probably divorce Kellyanne not because he's no longer conservative, but because she and her boss have destroyed any chance conservatives like him have in the future to shape America. By their sheer undisguised evil, married with supreme incompetence, people see what conservatism is truly about. It's not about preserving the best of the past, about limiting the reach of government, about individual liberty; it's about raw power, the power to suppress your enemies and reward your cronies. Conservatism is nothing other than what obtains in Putin's Russia. George and his fellow-travelers have always tried to obfuscate that fact; Trump's great failing was that he made it plain.

Christmas is canceled and the divorce will be lit. But don't mourn too much for the marriage. Everything Trump touches dies. This time, it's the idea of principled conservatism.