Mr. Conway’s critical tweets seemed to particularly get under Mr. Trump’s skin. When Mr. Trump was president and his tweets still dictated news cycles, their testy exchanges helped elevate the Conway drama in a White House that often revolved around personalities and personal disputes. Mr. Trump once logged onto Twitter to refer to Mr. Conway as a “stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!” and railed against him as someone who was “VERY jealous of his wife’s success.”
Mr. Conway has long dismissed the idea that he somehow capitalized off his wife’s reputation and has said that in the course of a long marriage, it is hard to separate out which partner is responsible for the other’s fortune or fame. He has told friends that he felt he had no option but to put everything on the line to fight Mr. Trump, motivated at least in part by a sense of guilt by association.
“The way we structured our lives before the campaign, it enabled her to build her business so she could become the campaign manager,” Mr. Conway, who was previously a partner at the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, said in an interview in 2019. “I helped in ways that enabled her to go off and be the campaign manager, and go off to the White House in the spring of 2017.”
The couple has four children. When Ms. Conway finally left the White House in August 2020, she said it was to spend more time with her teenage children. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama,” she said.
In her memoir, “Here’s the Deal,” released last year, Ms. Conway wrote that the public spectacle of her marriage prompted Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, to at one point hand her a Post-it note with “the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy.”
“After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘OK’ to the other while looking at his phone,” Ms. Conway wrote. “We never went.”
In her book, she also accused George of being taken in by the attention and said he was essentially “cheating by tweeting.”