George Conway derided Donald Trump in a blistering op-ed for The Washington Post on Monday after the president repeatedly attacked four women of color in the House. Conway, who is the husband of White House Counsel Kellyanne Conway, called Trump a “racist president” and said that his recent language leaves no doubt that he is a bigot.
The conservative lawyer has been a fierce critic of the president despite the fact that his wife works for Trump. Conway penned a piece describing his own experience with racism, noting the time when he was a child and heard someone in a parking lot tell his mother, who was born in the Philippines, to go back to the country that she came from, an echo of the language used by Trump to attack four Democratic lawmakers in the House.
Conway said that at the time, the racially-tinged language didn’t bother him because he believed that America was fundamentally equal and that this type of xenophobic behavior was an aberration and would eventually fade away over the coming years. Now, he says, he realizes that he was wrong.
“The woman in the parking lot — there were many more like her, it turned out. They never went away. Today they attend rallies, and they post ugliness on Facebook or Twitter,” Conway wrote.
Despite that, he didn’t believe that Trump was racist.
“No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive,” he wrote.
“No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot,” Conway said.
Now, he says, he has changed his mind.
“Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president,” he concluded.
Conway’s statement comes a day after Trump wrote a series of offensive tweets attacking Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts). Without naming the women, he admonished them to stop telling people how the country should be run and return to the countries that they came from. All four women are citizens of the United States and three of the women were born in the U.S. Omar came to the U.S. as an immigrant when she was 12.
After facing intense criticism, Trump doubled down on his statement, causing House Democrats to call for a resolution condemning his sentiments.
