Kellyanne Conway is Our Crystal Ball
Her future mirrors that of the GOP, predicting a future of conservative policy objectives or a maturation of Trumpian rage
As the era of Donald Trump-in-office comes to a close, Americans must contend with a party unencumbered by the guiding light of any discernible platform. The Republican party is in shambles, and the assault on the Capitol that occurred five weeks ago is a testament to this breakage within the party. To be clear, this erosion of substance did not begin with Donald Trump, but his presidency has cast a long and damaging shadow over what was once the ‘Party of Lincoln,’ as well as the Party of Reagan, Bush(s), McCain, and Romney.
That these former bellwethers each held problematic beliefs and approaches to governance is paled in comparison to the depravity of this successor in the Office and of their platform. The administration succumbed to its own vanity in the first hours after the inauguration four years ago, when Sean Spicer took the podium and began venomously screaming lies down the throats of a collectively bewildered White House press corps.
As Trump leaves, the remaining Republican party will have to reckon with a devastating rift: One in which more than 100 Congressional leaders, including eight Senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, Rick Scott, Tommy Tuberville, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and John Kennedy) voted, without true cause, to reject the legitimate and certainly legal electoral votes that were certified and delivered to Congress from Arizona and/or Pennsylvania.
This makes a total of 147 of our nations Republican representatives in direct and egregious conflict with reality and the democratic norms of our nation, 147 of 261 Republican members across both chambers (Not including my own Congressman, Gus Bilirakis, proudly relayed that he would have voted with this bloc had it not been for his contraction of coronavirus just before ‘the big day’). To put it another way, that’s 56.3% of elected Republican legislators.
Donald Trump will exit the White House after fomenting a civil war within the party that he has left twice. But there is a particular individual that will illuminate the path forward for the Republican Party: Kellyanne Conway.
Conway was a pollster and political strategist, originally working with Ted Cruz’s primary efforts before signing on to the Trump campaign in the later stages of the 2016 race. She dragged her candidate across the finish line in spite of his conduct, repeated scandals, and the late surprise of an old recording in which he outlined his ‘playbook’ for picking up women (i.e., moving on them “like a bitch,” and then grabbing them “by the pussy;” all standard stuff for Donald Trump). And then, after securing victory for this unlikely and uncouth new president, she chose to stay on as Trump’s seemingly most loyal lackey for the majority of his four years in office.
Initially, this seemed like career suicide; she was the first female campaign manager to win a presidential election, and had very clearly tapped into something politically that virtually every other pundit had missed in the polling and analysis leading up to Election Day. Why then might she sign on for more of this team’s ineptitude of governance rather than shopping her services to the next campaign?
I’ve never operated under the assumption that Conway was an acolyte of this type of thinking, but rather a political operative that saw an opportunity for victory, and like a chameleon, took on whatever shade of fiction her boss required in the moment. There was obviously something in this administration’s future that caught her attention, whether or not the politics of it all appealed to her personally.
Indeed the transition from team Cruz to team Trump seems to signal an evolution of what once represented itself as the Tea Party. The next logical step of a government that won’t govern out of pure spite for the democratic process is a man at the helm who can’t even understand the top level responsibilities of governing. Leaving the chore, of course, to those very same senate and congressional personalities who obstruct, fenagle, and weasel out of substantive policy at every opportunity.
The feedback loop has been completed, and the Republican party has been left barren as a result. Leaders represent a singular, obstructive policy objective that will not succeed over at least the next two years, perhaps even longer, and young conservatives will see a continuing erosion of public trust in the institution they thought represented small government, responsible spending, and foreign engagement that promoted the bonds of diplomacy, peace, and friendship (albeit, mixed in with a bit of hawkish combativeness).
Instead, the party has embraced a man and an ideology that intends to foster friendliness to our adversaries in Russia and North Korea, thinks that nuclear detonations off the gulf coast might upend the North Atlantic hurricane season, and intentionally clogged up mail deliveries, rapid aid responses to Puerto Rico and California, and treatment efforts to slow the coronavirus in New York and elsewhere. He did all this as a reprisal to punish a democratic public that has never been on his side.
Combine this with a vindictive southern border policy, a rocky relationship with NATO and UN allies, and the withdrawal from common sense treaty agreements for nothing more than a dislike for the hand that signed them. Republicans are facing a reckoning as they begin to chart their future without Donald Trump or the benefit of his cult of personality.
These party leaders will have to reimagine policy positions and a governing strategy that can deliver the goods that people need. This chaos, this void is where Kellyanne Conway will thrive.
What Conway sees as her next act will telegraph how she sees the future of the Republican Party. She is no great champion of classical Republican ideals, nor the new wave of Trumpism. Rather, Conway is a weather vane of political will; she’ll wait, and analyze, and ultimately serve the next deep-seated current in red-camp politics.
Regardless of your personal feelings about her string of ‘alternative facts’ and outright lies in service to this outgoing president, she can feel something in the groundwater of this party that no one else did. Now more than ever, studying her next move will be crucial to understanding the future of this fractured party. After another polling catastrophe four years after Trump’s seemingly improbable victory, a totem of Republican energy is more important than ever.
Following Conway’s movements in the months to come will help track with the battles that are an inevitability here. The party of Trump will face off against what’s left of the Republican core. The recreation of a party platform will either embrace or reject this populist wing that seems to buck any semblance of accountability, truth, or logic, and Kellyanne Conway will almost assuredly come down on the winning side.
