Kellyanne Conway had all the makings of a feminist hero. A Gen Xer raised solely by women and then a self-made Republican pollster, she worked her way from summers on a blueberry farm to becoming the first woman ever to run a successful campaign to win the White House. As counselor to President Trump, she stood out as one of the only senior members in his orbit never to fall into a fracas that would survive a single news cycle. Yet even after maintaining four years of Trump’s goodwill, Conway is out, set to leave the Oval after the media successfully turned her distressed daughter’s mounting outbursts into a national tabloid story.
Conway’s 15-year-old daughter Claudia was free to post her pro-Bernie and anti-Trump screeds to her public TikTok account for some time, largely unnoticed by the public and intentionally ignored by the press. But when Claudia began actively name-dropping her own mother, the New York Times’s resident TikTok scholar Taylor Lorenz decided to signal-boost Claudia to #resistance fandom, notably disregarding the journalistic ethic of minimally covering the minor children of political figures.
Kellyanne Conway’s daughter is an outspoken leftist TikToker.
“Believe it or not, you can have your own opinions simply by educating yourself,” she says in one video https://t.co/BLKEWuj1S2 pic.twitter.com/J807CAE95x
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) June 30, 2020
To ppl being like “NYT journalist trying to expose her.” Claudia and I are mutuals and I literally talked to her. Also she’s been posting vids shouting out her fam on TikTok w/ tens of thousands of views, she wants followers/views and is outspoken abt her own beliefs. Don’t hate! pic.twitter.com/195Fm72C4h
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) June 30, 2020
In June, Claudia had about 31,000 followers. After Lorenz boosted her celebrity to hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, Claudia’s own TikTok following skyrocketed to nearly 650,000 followers, with her follower count growing by tens and even hundreds of thousands of users each day.
And of course, it became a match made in hell. Claudia’s diatribes against both Kellyanne and her father George, the prominent Never Trump attorney once highly regarded in Republican circles, became increasingly personal. Out of respect for her parents’ obvious request to back off of covering the public meltdown, I will not go into detail, but this is just a sample of what Conway was posting and how reporters such as Lorenz covered the obvious distress of a minor child.
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) July 3, 2020
And so, like any good parents, both Kellyanne and George have decided to step back from public life to put the tabloid-fueled feud to bed and focus on their daughter, whose allegations and public plans were growing increasingly unhinged and publicized by celebrity gossip rags, all thanks to the Paper of Record and one reporter who couldn’t help but stan a teenage girl.
“We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids,” Kellyanne wrote in a public statement of her and George while announcing her resignation. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”
In another universe, Kellyanne’s legacy would be that of a feminist trailblazer. For now, at least, it’s as a woman forced to sacrifice her career all because our woke lords of the media couldn’t leave her child alone.
