George Conway, a former anti-Trump Republican, to run for Congress as a Democrat

George Conway, the former Republican turned Donald Trump critic and ex-husband of the US president’s 2016 campaign manager and senior aide Kellyanne Conway, is running for Congress.

Conway, a conservative lawyer who helped start the Lincoln Project, a prominent anti-Trump group of Republicans, launched his bid as a Democrat seeking to represent New York’s 12th congressional district, in what will be a crowded field of contenders.

“We have a corrupt president, a mendacious president, a criminal president whose masked agents are disappearing people from our streets, who’s breaking international law, and he’s running our federal government like a mob protection racket,” Conway said in his video announcement on Tuesday.

“I know how to fight these people. They are corrupt, amoral people. They will stop at nothing to rig the system for themselves. I’ve been fighting Trump for years and nothing will stop me.”

Conway enters a competitive race for the Manhattan seat of the retiring Jerry Nadler. As of December, there were at least nine people in the running, including Jack Schlossberg, the social media personality whose grandfather is the former president John F Kennedy; the New York state assembly members Alex Bores and Micah Lasher; and the activist Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting.

Early in Trump’s first term, Conway had been considered as a possible solicitor general; his wife at the time, Kellyanne, was a senior White house adviser. But he grew increasingly critical of Trump and his administration, eventually becoming one of the most vocal and prominent anti-Trump critics in the Republican party, even as Kellyanne remained a key adviser to the president.

Ahead of the 2020 election, Conway co-founded the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group. But in August 2020, Conway announced that he was stepping away from his role there “to devote more time to family matters”.

Around the same time, the couple’s teenage daughter, Claudia Conway, had been making headlines with outspoken online statements against her parents’ political views. Kellyanne also announced that she would be leaving her role within the Trump administration.

In March 2023, George and Kellyanne announced their divorce. She remains an ally of Trump and spoke at the 2024 Republican national convention.

In his campaign announcement video on Tuesday, George said that as “a former Republican, now a Democrat, I fought Trump publicly in every way I could and I paid a price. I’ll never regret standing up to Trump.

“I don’t like what he’s done to our great country,” he added. “And now I’m running for Congress to take the fight directly back to him on your behalf, on the behalf of New Yorkers to whom I owe so much – to protect the fundamental rights and basic economic needs of all New Yorkers, to make our nation better than it was before, to write new laws that will safeguard our democracy so that we don’t end up facing autocracy ever again.

“This is no ordinary time, and I will not be an ordinary member of Congress.”