Is Kellyanne Conway the real first lady?

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last updated 19 March 2017

Is Kellyanne Conway the real first lady of President Trump's administration? That's the suggestion of a lengthy new profile of the silver-tongued White House counselor in Monday's edition of New York.

"In the time I spent observing her and talking to her over the past several weeks," Olivia Nuzzi writes of Conway, "her mood rarely seemed anything other than elated — perhaps because of how many people she encountered, wherever she went in Washington, who greeted her like a hometown hero." Even when Conway failed, Nuzzi observes, when she was caught in misstatements or falsehoods that would sink other political careers, Conway only became more central to the Trump team:

Her notoriety seemed only to help her standing with the president, who has kept her as a trusted adviser and the White House's most recognizable avatar on the outside. By March, she was less a pollster, campaign manager, or communications guru and more what the press expected Ivanka Trump would become in the absence of Melania Trump, who remains in New York with her young son, Barron — a pervasive female double of the president, an extension of his will and much more fiendishly committed to her boss than anyone else working on his behalf. Fewer than 50 days into the new administration, Conway had become almost inseparable from the public's idea of the Trump White House. That is, the functional first lady of the United States. [New York]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.