I continue to believe, if only for my own peace of mind, that Kellyanne could put a stop to this if she wanted to (at least on George’s end).

Hence my new hot take: Trump and the Conways are in cahoots and manufacturing a media-friendly distraction to draw attention away from … something. The looming Mueller report? The Democratic primary?

It’s a work in progress.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1108335293671845888

That tweet is pure Trump all the way through, especially insinuating that there’s a petty personal motive for an antagonist’s supposedly principled criticism. Is it true that Trump rejected Conway for a role at the DOJ rather than the other way around? Here’s what Politico reported last year:

Last year, around this time, [Conway] was deep into the process of putting together the extensive paperwork required to be nominated to head up the Justice Department’s civil division.

Conway had already completed a background check and was interviewing candidates to be his deputy when Comey was fired, according to sources familiar with the paperwork process. It was around that time that he started telling potential colleagues that he was having second thoughts about the whole thing. It just didn’t make sense, he told them, for him and his wife both to be targets in the Trump whirlwind at the same time.

Both Benjamin Wittes (another outspoken Trump critic and Comey pal) and Jonathan Adler claim to know through friends in the government that Team Trump was hoping Conway would accept the DOJ job:

Second, and I will be circumspect in how I say this, but I know that George's withdrawal disappointed folks in the Trump administration.

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) March 19, 2019

Fact check: True https://t.co/3n3kz7bQie

— Jonathan H. Adler (@jadler1969) March 20, 2019

Conway sent Trump a letter three weeks after Comey’s dismissal noting that he’d been selected to head the Civil Division and politely declining the job. The White House didn’t contradict him. Their communications now are less polite:

You. Are. Nuts. https://t.co/ZSpb3UXVPC

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 20, 2019

What really matters—who cares about me—is how many people have now reviewed the diagnostic criteria for Narcisisstic Personality Disorder? #ThankYouMrPresident https://t.co/p6nd1V306x

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 20, 2019

How well Trump knows Conway is known only to them but they’ve been acquainted long enough for POTUS to have sent him a grateful note in 2006 thanking him for his help in a business matter and praising his legal skills. Given how he likes to hire people with whom he’s already familiar and to do favors for loyal cronies, it makes all the sense in the world that he’d have looked to Kellyanne’s husband for a top Justice Department job. Now he has the same guy tweeting sections of the DSM-V at him, trying to convince the public that he has not one but two (at least) personality disorders.

And that seems pretty normal for America 2019, really. This isn’t even one of the daffier plot lines of “The Trump Show.” I remind you that POTUS’s ex-lawyer is headed to prison soon for paying hush money to the president’s porn-star former lover during the campaign. Stemming from an affair, by the way, that allegedly happened while his wife was home with their newborn child.

Which really puts that “husband from hell” line in context.

When Newt Gingrich complains about the “Kardashian era of politics,” where everything seems to operate at the level of a cheap reality show, I feel like he can probably find a more vivid example of the concept than Beto O’Rourke.

Anyway, something’s got to give. Either Trump’s going to go back to ignoring Conway (a good idea) or Conway’s going to realize that humiliating his boss’s wife daily is a bad look (a good idea) or Kellyanne’s going to move to a deserted island where she’ll fight daily for survival but at least not have to worry about what’s happening on Twitter hour by hour. I’ll envy her.