Kellyanne Conway, one of Donald Trump’s most staunchly anti-LGBT+ advisers, has just resigned
Kellyanne Conway at a White House news briefing in January 2020 (Alex Wong/Getty)
Donald Trump’s anti-LGBT+ senior White House adviser and 2016 presidential campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has announced that she will be leaving her position at the end of August.
Conway said in a statement on Sunday evening (23 August) that she was resigning to focus on her children, as she wanted to give them “less drama, more mama”, according to the BBC.
The Republican strategist and pollster, who is the highest-ranking woman in the White House and was the first woman to lead a successful presidential campaign in 2016, has a long history of opposing LGBT+ rights.
In 2002, Conway complained that the media reported too much on LGBT+ issues and too little on gun rights, claiming that gay rights were “not important to Americans”.
She added that the media had pushed changes in the public school curriculum, and said that “they’re so worried now about how many mommies Heather has that [the teacher] runs out of time” to teach basic civic lessons.
According to GLAAD, in 2017 Conway gave the keynote speech at the Family Leadership Summit, an event hosted by anti-LGBT+ group The FAMiLY Leader, which describes LGBT+ people as “practicing distorted sexual behaviour”.
In the same year, she spoke alongside Trump at the anti-LGBT+ hate group Family Research Council‘s Values Voter Summit.
Conway has also been accused of supporting conversion therapy.
Claudia Conway, daughter of Kellyanne Conway, supports LGBT+ rights and Black Lives Matter.
George Conway, husband of Kellyanne, is one of the founders of the Lincoln Project, an effort to beat Trump in the 2020 election.
But the Trump adviser said in the statement announcing her resignation: “[George and I] disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids.”
But Conway’s decision to step down as senior counsellor to the US president follows some very public clashes with her daughter, Claudia.
In late June, Twitter was stunned when countless users realised that Claudia is ardently anti-Donald Trump, frequents Black Lives Matter demonstrations and is wholly pro-LGBT+ rights.
In July, Claudia revealed that her parents were “forcing” her to delete her social media accounts.
Luckily, by the end of the month, she had returned to Twitter with a flurry of tweets criticising “racist homophobe” Donald Trump.
