George has complained to friends that Kellyanne has fallen inexplicably under the thrall of President 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…
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,” Mr. Carville cautioned when I reached him by phone in Louisiana, where he and Ms. 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,” Mr. 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.
