On Sunday (AEDT), George Conway confirmed the upcoming divorce with a tweet. “We are in the final stages of an amicable divorce,” he wrote adding that their four children remained their top priority, and asking for privacy.

Trump earlier weighed in on his social media network, where he congratulated Kellyanne on her divorce from her “wacko husband”, whom he described as a “disgusting albatross around her neck”.

George replied, telling the president that he was “looking forward to seeing you in New York at E Jean’s trial next month! Hugs and kisses”, a reference to writer E Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s and filed suit against him last year under a New York law giving a one-time extension of the statute of limitations in such cases.

George Conway’s critical tweets seemed to particularly get under Trump’s skin. When Trump was president and his tweets still dictated news cycles, their testy exchanges helped elevate the Conway drama in a White House that often revolved around personalities and personal disputes.

Trump once logged on to Twitter to refer to George Conway as a “stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!” and railed against him as someone who was “VERY jealous of his wife’s success”.

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George Conway has long dismissed the idea that he somehow capitalised off his wife’s reputation and has said that in the course of a long marriage, it is hard to separate out which partner is responsible for the other’s fortune or fame. He has told friends that he felt he had no option but to put everything on the line to fight Trump, motivated at least in part by a sense of guilt by association.

“The way we structured our lives before the campaign, it enabled her to build her business so she could become the campaign manager,” George Conway, who was previously a partner at the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, said in an interview in 2019.

“I helped in ways that enabled her to go off and be the campaign manager, and go off to the White House in the spring of 2017.”

The couple has four children. When Kellyanne Conway finally left the White House in August 2020, she said it was to spend more time with her teenage children. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama,” she said.

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In her memoir, Here’s the Deal, released last year, she wrote that the public spectacle of her marriage prompted Ivanka Trump, Trump’s eldest daughter, to at one point hand her a Post-it note with “the names of two local doctors who specialised in couples therapy”.

“After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘OK’ to the other while looking at his phone,” Kellyanne Conway wrote. “We never went.”

In her book, she also accused her husband of being taken in by the attention and said he was essentially “cheating by tweeting”.

“It seemed the flood of reaction and attention he was receiving was magnetic and irresistible,” she said.

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While the disagreements between them eventually became insurmountable, the Conways may have stood a chance to remain together longer than many in Washington assumed.

“George believed the marriage could be saved,” said Philippe Reines, a former top adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton who became an unexpected confidant of George Conway’s. “But she needed to leave the White House to have a chance. By then, though, it was too far gone.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.