Kellyanne Conway at a White House news briefing in January 2020 (Alex Wong/Getty)
The former senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway is the latest member of Trump’s inner circle to test positive for coronavirus after attending a Rose Garden event last week.
The crowded ceremony in which Trump announced his anti-LGBT+ Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is already being called a “super spreader” event after at least seven guests tested positive for the virus.
Conway, 53, was seen mingling closely with attendees, touching her face and wearing no mask during the ceremony.
“Tonight I tested positive for COVID-19,” Conway announced on Twitter less than a week later. “My symptoms are mild (light cough) and I’m feeling fine. I have begun a quarantine process in consultation with physicians.
“As always, my heart is with everyone affected by this global pandemic.”
However, it was actually Conway’s daughter Claudia who first broke the news. The outspoken 15-year-old, whose parents recently booted off social media for expressing liberal, pro-LGBT+ views, took to TikTok to share her mother’s symptoms.
“My mom coughing all around the house after Trump tested positive for COVID,” she wrote to her 900,000 followers as she lip-synced the lines “that’s weird, that’s suspicious”.
“Update my mom has COVID,” she added on Friday night, half an hour before her mother made an announcement. “I’m furious. Wear your masks. Don’t listen to our idiot f**king president piece of sh*t. Protect yourself and those around you.”
Claudia also posted another controversial video, which has since been deleted, that blames her mother for refusing to wear a mask and in turn infecting the whole family.
I know Claudia Conway is going to need a lifetime of therapy but damn her TikTok game is on point pic.twitter.com/nC84whfs17
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 3, 2020
Claudia’s strident left-wing views have repeatedly brought her into conflict with her parents. In August Kellyanne Conway announced she would be stepping down from her political role to focus on her children, saying she wanted to give them “less drama, more mama”.
Before her resignation she was the highest-ranking woman in the White House and one of Trump’s most anti-LGBT+ advisers.
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.