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Trinity v. Conway

By Charlotte Allen

Graduate magna cum laude from Dear Old Alma Mater, donate $50,000 to help keep its ivied halls open because you want to be true to your school—and get slammed in public from here to Sunday by the college president because you don’t happen to be in accord with her anti-Trump, pro-unlimited-immigration political beliefs.

Such is the fate of Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump and also a 1989 graduate of Trinity Washington University (or Trinity College, as it was then known), a 120-year-old Catholic liberal-arts institution for women in Washington, D.C. On February 12, Trinity’s president, Patricia McGuire, writing on her official president’s blog, delivered a 216-word slap in the face to Conway that essentially called her a serial liar:

Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has played a large role in facilitating the manipulation of facts and encouraging the grave injustice being perpetrated by the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants among many other issues. She is one of President Trump’s primary spokespersons, an almost daily figure on cable news shows. Some people admire her staunch advocacy for her client’s positions, and others applaud the fact that she was the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign. But in fact, as is true of many of President Trump’s statements, her advocacy on his behalf is often at variance with the truth. Ms. Conway invented the now-infamous phrase “alternative facts” to defend Trump’s claims about the size of crowds at his inauguration, a thinly-veiled autocratic scheme to try to claim that the Trump inauguration drew the biggest crowd in history when, in fact, it was on the smaller side. Ms. Conway has been part of a team that thinks nothing of shaping and spreading a skein of lies as a means to secure power. Perhaps the “Bowling Green Massacre” comment was truly a mistake, as she claims, but she repeated that canard on three different occasions as an explanation for why the travel ban, an executive order that clearly discriminates against Muslims, was necessary.

Hey, President McGuire, what did Kellyanne Conway ever do to you? And, if I were Kellyanne, I’d be asking: How can I get my $50,000 back? According to the Washington Post, McGuire, who has served as Trinity’s president since the year that Conway graduated, was not above contacting alumna Conway personally and over the phone for needed dollars:

McGuire never hesitated to call her to ask for donations to Trinity, Conway added. She and her husband donated $50,000 to a 1999-2002 Trinity fundraising campaign. “My money was good.”

What’s really strange is this paragraph in McGuire’s blog post, which she titled “On Lies and Truths We Must Tell”:

In a recent conversation with some Trinity students, I was horrified and saddened to learn that some of our students who have DACA status have been hassled, frisked and interrogated at airports for domestic travel during the Christmas holidays, and others are now fearful of traveling within the U.S. to go home to other states to see families and friends, or for summer jobs. The climate for all immigrants has become treacherous. I wonder if other members of our Trinity community who are immigrants, regardless of status, have similar experiences or fears, and would welcome comments about this (email me privately at [email protected]).

“Christmas holidays”? Um, Trump wasn’t president in December 2016. If you’re feeling miserable about having been “hassled, frisked, and interrogated” at U.S. airports (join the crowd!) while trying to celebrate Yule with your family, the name of the president you have to blame is Barack Obama.

As the Washington Post pointed out, most college presidents, mindful that alumni donations are a critical source of financial growth and stability, refrain from singling out specific alums for political criticism. McGuire, however, as the Post also pointed out, seems to be on an anti-Trump and perhaps anti-Conway crusade, flooding Twitter with tweets specifically directed at Conway. For example:


As Conway noted, McGuire has been conspicuously silent for a president of a Catholic college about criticizing Democratic-party Trinity alumni Nancy Pelosi (House minority leader) and Kathleen Sebelius (Health and Human Services secretary under Obama), even though both support a nearly limitless version of abortion rights that doesn’t comport with Catholic teaching.

Just saying.

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