Mark Leibovich

George, as anyone even casually familiar with the wacky spectacles surrounding our 45th president is aware, is the prominent conservative lawyer who has been increasingly open about his contempt for President Donald Trump, mostly via Twitter. This is notable because he is also the husband of the White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, making him one-half of the marital embodiment of Trump-era Washington — a seething, divided, bizarre crucible, in other words.

George wore a dark polo shirt and appeared to be alone on this warm afternoon. I imagined him to be depressed over Barr’s synopsis and out for a walk to clear his head while his wife labored triumphantly at the White House. I barely know George. We’ve met a few times and texted occasionally (like many Washington reporters, I’ve tried to interview him about his marriage, to no avail). I decided to leave him alone with his thoughts.

He later confirmed (via text) that it was he, but that he was not alone; George said he was shepherding a bunch of kids around the zoo, a task that he compared to herding wild animals. “Or working at the White House,” I replied, trying to egg him on. He didn’t bite, at least on the record.

George has complained to friends that Kellyanne has fallen inexplicably under the thrall of Trump — and that he would prefer a wife who was not captured. Kellyanne, meanwhile, believes that her husband has been disrespectful of her in his public criticisms of her boss, and she wishes he would air his complaints in private. It’s obviously more complicated, but those seem to be the broad contours of their grievances.

By all appearances, it had been another belligerent week for the Conways. George had just a few days earlier tweeted out clinical definitions of narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder in reference to the president of the United States. He went on to suggest that “a serious inquiry needs to be made about this man’s condition of mind.” His wife, all the while, continued to stand by her man — in this case, the man in the White House.

Kellyanne countered that she did not share her husband’s concern for the president’s mental well-being, and then added something sarcastic about how she had been taking care of the couple’s four children that morning and was engaging in real “substantive” conversations with Trump so (if you’ll excuse her) she might not be fully up to speed on whatever it was her husband was tweeting about that morning.

Naturally, the president himself weighed in, dismissing George — “Mr. Kellyanne Conway” — as “a total loser” and the “husband from hell.” This was not your standard strange Washington bedfellow shtick, in other words. It was a far cry from the love prevailing over politics meme and Americans learning to disagree without being disagreeable, and all that.

Politics has always loved a good odd-couple story. That the cable combatants James Carville (the Bill Clinton strategist) and Mary Matalin (the Bush and Cheney operative) were married in real life held a certain novelty and quaintness in the relatively tame Beltway soap opera of the 1990s. It could also be marketable. The Carville-Matalin political-enemies/life-partners routine reaped them a fortune of book, speaking, TV and endorsement deals.

But the love-over-politics plotline seems to be another casualty of an administration that has torched even the most time-honored of Washington chestnuts. Far from anything uplifting, the ballad of George and Kellyanne has provided a running background mishegoss to the main noise. George will tweet, with increasing disgust, about the president; people (who pay attention to these things) will notice, and the media will cover it, especially when he takes on a matter relating to presidential scandal, including impeachment, which he had experience with as a prime mover against Bill Clinton’s presidency two decades ago.

It’s also hard to look away when George seems to implicitly — or explicitly — chastise those who still support and enable Trump (for example, his wife). Members of Team Kellyanne jump on Twitter to retaliate, on her behalf. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said George was a bad husband, and Eric Trump called his actions “horrible.” George told The Washington Post that he was compelled to tweet about the White House “so I don’t end up screaming at her,” meaning Kellyanne. All totally normal!

At first, it was impossible not to wonder whether the Conways were staging some elaborate marital feud, tailor-made to gin up maximum publicity in the attention vortex that is the Trump White House. Were they positioning themselves for some kind of post-White House “reconciliation” act? You could imagine the joint memoir or reality show or live stage possibilities.

But it is also impossible not to wonder whether their joint memoir is being written in real time, and we are watching a life partnership fracture on Twitter, a casualty of a third wheel in the marriage — Donald Trump.

This is the part of the story where we call in the authorities to remind us that (slowly, everyone) no one really knows what goes on in the privacy of a marriage. “Hey, I don’t live in their house,” Carville cautioned when I reached him by phone in Louisiana, where he and Matalin have lived for 12 years in apparent harmony (and if not, it would be off-brand, so they would never tweet about it). “They might be the happiest people or the saddest people in the world,” Carville said of the Conways. “Or maybe somewhere in between, like everyone.”

Remember, too, that we are living in what’s becoming an intensely performative culture, with new outlets for different personas — one for home; one for work; one for Instagram, cable, etc. Open friction is no longer so easily subsumed by the almighty virtue of comity. “Everybody seems to be playing a certain role, and that should add another layer of skepticism about what’s really going on with people,” said Gil Troy, a presidential historian at McGill University who has written about political couples.

To strike a more neutral note: Maybe the Conways simply embody the Washington power couple we all deserve in the Trump era. “This marriage represents the train wreck that is our current political culture,” Troy said. “We are all intertwined as Americans, like we’re all in a marriage together and constantly colliding against one another. No one knows who’s going to break first and what will be the breaking point.”

Stuck inside george and kellyanne's marriage

Last Sunday, shortly after Attorney General William Barr had released his no collusion/maybe obstruction summary of Robert Mueller’s report, I spotted George Conway wandering out of the National Zoo in Washington.

Stuck inside George and Kellyanne's marriage

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Mark Leibovich

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Stuck inside George and Kellyanne's marriage