George T. Conway III, the former conservative lawyer and one of President Trump’s fiercest critics, is moving closer to announcing a run for Congress in one of Manhattan’s wealthiest and bluest districts, pitching himself to potential donors as a top attorney who does not “have any more effs to give.”
Mr. Conway, 62, who currently lives in Bethesda, Md., has hired the Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg to work on a budding campaign to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, who is retiring. He is also scouting apartments in the district where he lived and worked for years before relocating to Washington in 2017 when his wife at the time, Kellyanne Conway, joined the first Trump administration as a senior White House official. (The Conways divorced in 2023.)
Mr. Conway outlined his pitch on Tuesday night at a private virtual event for paid members of Democracy Docket, the media outlet founded by Marc Elias, the Democratic attorney.
There, he said he had landed on the idea of running for Mr. Nadler’s seat after feeling frustrated by the eight Senate Democrats who caved this month and voted with Republicans to reopen the government without a deal to extend expiring health care subsidies.
Once he started thinking about it, Mr. Conway said, he quickly came to the conclusion that “this is crazy, but the crazy thing about it is it’s not so crazy,” according to a video of the event obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Conway, once a card-carrying member of the conservative Federalist Society who also worked behind the scenes on behalf of former President Bill Clinton’s accusers, said he would run as a Democrat.
“That will put some people off, I think,” he said.
But he said his pitch to voters would be that he has proved himself to be a fearless opponent to Mr. Trump. And he said he would serve in Congress as a “wingman” to attorneys like Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, and Representative Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, who won his seat in Congress after serving as the lead counsel in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.
“This is the time for a lawyer who has never been in politics to go into politics,” Mr. Conway said. “This is lawyering now.”
Referring to Mr. Trump and his administration, he added: “We need to do things to make sure there is accountability. We need to undo the damage that he has done to the Justice Department. And then we have to create new safeguards that are going to make the Watergate safeguards look like child’s play.”
Mr. Conway, once a Trump supporter who cried tears of joy on election night in 2016, began publicly rebuking the president shortly after he was sworn in for his first term, when he fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Mr. Conway’s vocal critiques of the president, coming from a man whose wife served as one of his top White House advisers, helped Mr. Conway build a following online.
There, he often diagnosed Mr. Trump with narcissistic personality disorder and declared him unfit to hold office.
Mr. Trump helped fuel the feud, calling Mr. Conway a “stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!” When the Conways divorced in 2023, Mr. Trump congratulated Ms. Conway on finally ridding herself of her “wacko husband.”
If he were to run, Mr. Conway would enter a crowded field that might still become larger. There are already 10 people running in the Democratic primary, including a Kennedy scion, a Gen Z democratic socialist and Mr. Nadler’s own longtime confidant who has been considered the favorite and heir apparent to the seat.
On the Tuesday night call, Mr. Conway told the group that Democrats needed “people who don’t have any more effs to give. That’s the advantage I have. I’m not going to run for anything else.”
He added: “I want to fight these mothers. This looks like a way to do it.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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