Conservative lawyer George Conway said President Trump’s bold changes to the federal government reveal an effort to “destroy” its institutions and exact “revenge” on the country.
“This is an attempt — basically, Donald Trump wants to have revenge on the United States of America,” Conway, a fierce Trump critic, said in an interview on MSNBC.
“He doesn’t care about what anything does,” he continued. “He’s appointed [Elon] Musk, given him free rein. Musk has no idea what anything does.”
Since returning to the White House, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken several steps to shrink the federal government and curb waste, including mass layoffs likely to impact hundreds of thousands of government employees.
Conway was asked in the interview whether he thinks the president will change his approach now that he’s starting to see some resistance to his actions — including by federal workers who quit the department that became DOGE over security concerns and by Republican voters who have challenged their representatives at town hall meetings.
“My guess is that they just want to burn it all down,” Conway said about the Trump administration. “I mean, I don’t see any rationality in what they’re doing other than that it is a performative attack on the government, and it is an attempt to destroy what they perceive to be as the enemy, which is the very government that they are charged with administering.”
“And that’s the only way to explain almost everything this administration has done, everything that Donald Trump has done since the very, you know, since before he was sworn in as president, when he nominated people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard,” Conway said.
The Hill has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.
