Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway said in an interview done before he took a leave of absence from the group that the Trump presidency was akin to “a practical joke that got out of hand.”
Conway announced Sunday he was leaving the group just as his wife, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, announced that she would be leaving her position at the end of the month. The two indicated they wanted to focus more on their family.
In the interview conducted earlier, George Conway, a vocal critic of President Trump’s, said he voted for him in 2016 and strongly considered the administration’s offer to head up the Justice Department’s civil division, as first reported by the Daily Beast.
“Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republican nominees, but I was hopeful that he would calm down and get better as time went on,” Conway said in an interview for the documentary “#Unfit.”
“The problem was, once he got into the supreme position of power, he lost some of his incentive to be disciplined. And I’m thinking at this point in time: What’s wrong with him? Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand.”
In the interview, Conway describes being fully convinced Trump was a racist after the president tweeted that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) should “go back” to where they came from. All four women are U.S. citizens and all but Omar were born in the U.S.
Conway, whose mother was Filipino, compared the attacks to similar ones he said were levied against her.
“What he said about those members of Congress brought back that memory of, wow, there really are people like that here. I was with my mother when I was a teenager in a parking lot in Massachusetts, and somebody said to her, ‘Go back to your country,’” Conway said, becoming emotional. “And I found that to be … it really came home to me: This man is a racist, he is evil.”
Conway, who had been a vocal Trump critic for years before his association with The Lincoln Project, announced his hiatus from the group Sunday night.