George Conway—spouse of President Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway—unleashed a series of caustic tweets on Sunday morning suggesting the president is mentally unfit to govern.
“. . .You’re mentally unwell. You engage in bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior, which prompts criticism of you, which triggers more bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior,” Conway tweeted Sunday morning, adding his assessment that Trump was not “presidential” and would have been fired from any other job by now.
The diatribe was spurred by Trump’s midnight-hour tweet in which the president had acknowledged the seeming un-presidential nature of directly confronting the “corrupt media” and its purveyors.
In the tweet, Trump had characterized his determination to “hit back” at “fake news” as protective. Failing to hit back, he surmised, leaves citizens vulnerable to believing legacy media’s incessant, false, and negative spin on him and his administration.
“I know it is not at all ‘Presidential’ to hit back at the Corrupt Media, or people who work for the Corrupt Media, when they make false statements about me or the Trump Administration. Problem is, if you don’t hit back, people believe the Fake News is true. So we’ll hit back!” President Trump tweeted.
Conway’s infuriated screed continued from there.
He added his psychological assessment in a series of tweets in which he encouraged the president to “resign and seek the psychological treatment you so obviously need” in light of Trump’s “myriad psychiatric problems.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter called Conway’s tweets “astonishing.”
Conway doubled down in response to Stetler’s tweet, saying “What’s astonishing is the media’s and the nation’s utter failure to confront the fact that was have a psychologically unwell and unfit president.”
Dwight Holton, whose Twitter bio indicates he is a former US Attorney for Oregon, jumped on Conway’s bandwagon, adding his contention that GOP senators’ failure to impeach or otherwise publicly censure the president amounts to a “dereliction of duty.”
Conway’s long-standing, very public expressions of displeasure with the president seem to have intensified recently, successive tweetstorms mostly variations on a familiar theme—that the president is a deranged, pathological liar who routinely dupes his supporters.
Whether Conway counts his spouse as among those so-duped is unclear.
Last week, Conway challenged Trump’s assessment of the “glowing reviews from the British media” he had received during his visit to the United Kingdom.
Last month, the conservative Never-Trumper penned another Tweet-screed in which he charged that President Trump suffered from personality disorders. The attorney included both narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder in his diagnostic assessment.
Antisocial Personality Disorder is the condition with which serial killers are regularly diagnosed.
Conway’s other Twitter-issued psychiatric evaluations on President Trump have referenced “pathological” lying and “incoherent rambling”.
Though Conway appears to be serious with his lay psychiatric diagnoses, he waxed metaphorical in a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post in April. In it, he referred to Trump as a “cancer on the presidency” and encouraged Congress to remove him from office.
The op-ed was a response to Mueller report, which the president said exonerated him. Predictably, Conway took issue with that characterization.
Conway and his fellow conservative and libertarian never-Trumper colleagues seek to “provide a voice and network for like-minded attorneys” under the banner of the Checks & Balances group. Other members include former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Paul Rosenzweig.
Conway’s encouragement for media professionals to lend air time to the “hundreds of mental health professionals who have been trying to get the public’s attention on this issue for the last three years,” may be a steep climb.
The ethical guidelines for psychologists (American Psychological Association) and psychiatrists (American Psychiatric Association) traditionally frown upon publicly offering diagnostic impressions for people with whom they have not established a professional relationship.
That hasn’t stopped some, apparently, from doing it anyway.
A group making an independent film to that effect and tweeting under “@Duty2Warn” went to far as to say they agreed with Conway and offered to make a referral.
In stark contrast to her husband’s arguably unhinged remarks on social media, Kellyanne Conway’s most recent tweets include: a birthday wish for Vice President Pence, an expression of condolence for Cadet C.J. Morgan—the 22-year-old who lost his life in a military vehicle accident at West Point, and a statement on the growing rate of U.S. productivity in the first quarter of 2019.
The president offered his take on George Conway in a blistering tweet this spring in which he called Conway a “stone cold loser” and a “husband from hell.”
Whether he is a “husband from hell” is Kellyanne’s determination to make—and hers alone.
Whether he is a “stone cold loser,” however, seems a fair question for the public to determine.
