Conservative attorney George Conway has responded with a blistering op-ed after he was the target of an insult-laden midnight Twitter diatribe from President Donald Trump over an ad, released by a group Conway co-founded, criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 60-second ad was released Monday by The Lincoln Project, a conservative Republican group opposed to Trump. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the president had lambasted founders of the group as “LOSERS,” calling out several members by name, including Conway, whom he labeled the “deranged loser of a husband” of his White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway. The president’s visceral response gave the group a major publicity and funding boost, its founders told several media outlets.
In the opinion article published Wednesday by The Washington Post, Conway detailed why he believed the president “went ballistic on Twitter” over the video.
“Trump’s narcissism deadens any ability he might otherwise have had to carry out the duties of a president in the manner the Constitution requires. He’s so self-obsessed, he can only act for himself, not for the nation,” Conway wrote.
“And it’s why he reacts with such rage. He fears the truth.”
Another Lincoln Project co-founder, longtime GOP strategist Rick Wilson, had shared similar sentiments about being the target of name-calling from the president in his own op-ed, titled “Trump Can’t Handle the Truth, and We Just Proved It.” And political consultant Reed Galen, also a founding member, wrote that Trump’s response proved the very point they sought to make. “No commercial should have the power to derail the leader of the free world,” he wrote.
The Lincoln Project spot, titled “Mourning in America,” is an inversion of President Ronald Reagan’s hopeful 1984 “Morning in America” campaign ad. It placed blame on Trump for the “weaker and sicker and poorer” America under his leadership through the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, George Conway claims, as Trump’s approval numbers slide, his “lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths ― have all come home to roost.”
“And while Trump’s mind roils in rage, too many Americans are losing their lives,” Conway concluded. “That’s the losing that matters, to everyone but him.”
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