At this point, Kellyanne Conway should just say it: “I hate my husband.”

Of all the depressing subplots in the chronically gloomy “Trump Show,” the marriage of Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to the U.S. president, and George Conway, conservative lawyer and fierce critic of the U.S. president, is now sadder than any political relationship anywhere in the world. These two make Johnny Depp and Amber Heard seem stable.

Even Melania Trump is more serene than Kellyanne.

More evidence of Conway marital dysfunction reared its ugly head this week when the Washington Examiner posted audio of a bonkers phone call Kellyanne initiated with reporter Caitlin Yilek. Conway was responding to a story Yilek wrote about a Beltway rumour, first reported by Bloomberg, that claims Trump wants to replace his chief-of-staff, the gaffe-machine Mick Mulvaney. Conway was cited as a possible replacement. But when the story included a reference to her husband, a man who repeatedly savages Trump’s mental health, corruption, incompetence and fitness for office on Twitter, that’s when Kellyanne blew a peroxide gasket.

I have no doubt she’ll see that line as sexist. She sees everything as sexist.

“So I just am wondering why in God’s earth you would need to mention anything about George Conway’s tweets in an article that talks about me as possibly being chief-of-staff,” she lectured Yilek, in an unhinged exchange the conservative paper rightfully characterized as “bullying” and “harassment.”

“Let me tell you something, from a powerful woman,” Conway continued. “Don’t pull the crap where you’re trying to undercut another woman based on who she’s married to. (George) gets his power through me, if you haven’t noticed. Not the other way around.”

Wow. As the audio made the media rounds on Thursday, George Conway tweeted a cryptic observation: “I’ve learned a lot about narcissism over the past couple of years that I didn’t know previously. In fact, I didn’t know it had a label, although I had seen it without knowing it.”

You can draw your own conclusions.

I really regret writing a column last December, in which I argued George Conway was 100 per cent right on the issues, but ultimately a bad husband. My thesis was that, by criticizing his wife’s boss, George was undermining her at work. His attacks on Trump, while clearly on the right side of history, were on the wrong side of his marital vows. That was my argument back in 2018.

I was dead wrong.

For a self-described “powerful woman,” Conway is shockingly pathetic.

You almost have to feel sorry for her. So much of her self-concept is inextricably laced into the idea that she was the first woman to lead a presidential campaign to glory. But if the person she helped elect was Donald Trump, I’m sorry, that is nothing to brag about. It’s reason to hang your head in shame. It’s as if Kellyanne helped invent the atom bomb.

Yes, a historic achievement. And horrific in its consequences.

Listening to Conway’s call with the Washington Times reminded me of a profile last year in the Washington Post. At one point, she tells writer Ben Terris: “If you make this story all about (George), I’ll definitely push back on that after it’s printed. There’s no story about me, except the overcoming of circumstance and the fact that I’m so independent.”

Right. This seems to be the crux of Kellyanne’s antipathy toward her husband. She wants the world to believe she is “independent,” even though it was George who introduced her to Trump. She demands hosannas instead of censure. She wants an A-grade based on gender when what she deserves is a group F based on Trump’s failures.

But if Conway had a lick of sense — and the fact she still works in the White House proves she does not — she’d wrap her arms around her husband, kiss him on the cheek and thank him for seeing the light on behalf of both of them. She’d realize a loving mother of four should never be OK with an administration that locks kids in cages. She’d take stock of how Trump has polarized the free world, how he has betrayed, as Bruce Springsteen recently noted, what it means to be American.

Trump is in this for himself. It’s not complicated.

But by supporting him unconditionally, Kellyanne is also in this for herself.

She’s not an “independent” or “powerful” woman: she is a disgrace.

Her husband George has, in his awkward way, tried to show her the light, tried to rope her back into reality. But instead of listening, Kellyanne has covered her ears and shouted at him and everyone else. She’s publicly sided with Trump, who called her husband a “stone cold loser.” She’s allowed her blind ambition to obscure what is obvious: Trump is a fraud and pox on humanity.

And this “he gets his power through me” line Conway spilled to the Washington Times about her husband also does not telegraph strength. It screams hostility and resentment and passive-aggressive garbage. It suggests that, on a deep psychological level, Kellyanne knows she is a cog in an evil wheel, but needs to point fingers elsewhere, including at her husband.

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Once again this week, she picked her career over her soul mate.

That doesn’t make Kellyanne Conway a feminist hero; it makes her a terrible wife.

Correction - Oct. 28, 2019: This column was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said that the Washington Times posted an audio of a phone call between Kellyanne Conway and one of its reporters. In fact, the audio was posted by the Washington Examiner.

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