Top Donald Trump confidante Kellyanne Conway confronted fellow conservative Meghan McCain backstage at a women’s summit, witnesses told the Daily Beast.
The tête-à-tête was over a grudge Conway has held for many years against McCain, for describing her and her then-husband George Conway as “gross” during TV appearances on The View and Watch What Happens Live.
Conway confronted McCain after the two appeared together on a panel at The Washington Post’s post-election Global Women’s Summit. The event was organized by Tina Brown, the founder of the Daily Beast.
After the on-stage panel discussion about the effect of the election on women ended, Conway confronted McCain in the green room just off stage in a scene “like something from the Real Housewives,” an eyewitness told the Beast.
“Kellyanne walked up to Meghan and said, ‘I wasn’t going to say this while I was miked but do you remember what you said about me and my marriage on The View?’” the witness said. “You called my marriage ‘gross.’”
Conway and McCain had not directly debated each other on the panel, adding to the surprise for witnesses that there was a confrontation, though Conway had appeared at times combative towards the moderator and audience, some witnesses said.
Conway was heard saying to McCain, “Do you realize what you said and what you did? Do you realize all the people you hurt?”
McCain, who quit The View in 2021 and is now a podcaster, appeared shaken over the confrontation, which lasted a matter of minutes, and keen to leave. Friends said she was later “shaking” with emotion.
“I heard Meghan say to her, ‘I don’t remember what I said that hurt you,’” the witness said, and McCain apologized to Conway. The witness added, “Meghan said it was making her uncomfortable but that seemed to make it worse.”
McCain, 40, walked away from Conway, 57, who appeared unfazed. The witness said, “Meghan looked shaken and was just trying to get out of there.”
The political divisions and tension within Conway’s family played out publicly, especially on social media, during Trump’s first presidency.
While Conway was in the Oval Office advising Trump as counselor to the president, her husband George and eldest daughter Claudia were nearly incessantly tweeting and TikToking their dissent. At one point, Claudia said she wanted to emancipate herself from her mother, while her father did just that: he divorced his wife of 22 years, with whom he shares four children, in 2023. Claudia, now 20, and her mother have reconciled personally although they remain politically at odds.
Conway told the Daily Beast, “I waited until the cameras and microphones were off to privately and calmly address the very public insults she has directed at my family.”
Conway added, “She may wish to outrun her recent past as a years-long resident Mean Girl on The View and Bravo, where her mouth was a spigot of vile and bile hurled toward people and topics she does not know, including my marriage and children, and casually lying about silly things like me calling her (I don’t have her number).”
McCain said, “It was a bizarre experience and certainly not what I expected when I accepted an invitation to speak at an event hosted by The Washington Post and Tina Brown. The only reason why their marriage was ever a hot topic was because they were constantly airing their dirty laundry to America.”
The Beast established that Conway’s feelings were rooted in comments on multiple episodes of The View in 2018 and in April 2020 on NBC’s Watch What Happens Live, when McCain called both of the Conways “gross” and claimed that Conway would call her every time she mentioned her on air.
In the 2020 segment, host Andy Cohen asked McCain, who has appeared on the show dozens of times, and fellow guest Erika Jayne, a cast member of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, to identify whether quotes were from “a president or a [Real] Housewife,” then had his guest, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) read the clue: “She is married to a total whack job. She must have done a number on him. I don’t know what she did to that guy.”
McCain correctly identified it as having been said by Trump and being about Kellyanne and George Conway. Cohen then asked what she thought about the couple, who had become a fixture of political coverage for their directly opposed views on Trump almost at the start of his administration.
That prompted McCain to say, “I think it’s awful and I think that they have four kids that are gonna read this c–p and I think it’s awful. I think it’s weird and I don’t care if it’s their kink or whatever I think it’s horrible… I think they’re both gross.” She added, “Wait can I say one more thing. Don’t call me or email me Kellyanne. She does that every time I say something.”
Conway called that claim a “lie” in her 2022 memoir, Here’s The Deal, writing that she had never called McCain and did not even have her number. She wrote that they had only once exchanged emails, which was a “friendly” invitation from McCain to join The View and have dinner with both their husbands. In the book, Conway called McCain a “know it all”; accused her of “ad nauseam, ad hominem attacks on me”; suggested she had “cashed in” on her father’s two failed presidential runs; and relayed a conversation with McCain’s husband Ben Domenech in which he said of his wife’s then-role, “The View is the worst show on television.”
Conway has not been a formal part of the Trump campaign or transition for his second term, but has been a fierce public advocate for him in this election cycle, including as a columnist with DailyMail.com.
Sources said that the confrontation by Conway at the women’s summit was the first proper meeting between the two.
“It doesn’t look like there will be a second,” one friend said.
