It works better when you watch, trust me. Kellyanne usually loses these exchanges with reporters about George’s political activities since her shtick of treating questions on the subject as inherently unfair is lame. The Conway story is so bizarre that it would be newsworthy even if they were a pair of local politicos. Imagine Kellyanne as senior advisor to some mayor somewhere and her husband George, a bigshot lawyer in town, putting up fliers all over Main Street about how the mayor sucks. Instead we get to watch this psychodrama play out on the grandest possible stage, in full view of national media. It’s not as if George’s critiques of Trump are pedestrian or restrained either. I could understand Kellyanne’s annoyance if he were tweeting his disagreement with Trump’s marginal tax rates and reporters were confronting her about it in interview after interview. But George’s point on Twitter every day isn’t that Trump’s trade war is foolish or whatever. It’s that he’s a narcissistic sociopath whose mind is degenerating by the day.

So yeah, I confess, I might run that subject by Kellyanne too if I interviewed her. “Your husband, who knows the president and used to support him, considers him a dangerous lunatic. You think he’s magnificent and want four more years. How can two people who are so close, presumably sharing lots of firsthand information about the subject, differ so sharply in their assessments?”

But it’s Blitzer who comes off worse in this interview, mainly because he’s so clearly uncomfortable raising the subject and unprepared to defend doing so — even though he had every reason to know from her other recent interviews that Conway would attack once he broached the subject of George. That’s what makes the exchange up top so funny. Obviously he’s confronting her with a clip of George because they’re married; it’s true that George is a star lawyer and a stalwart legal conservative dating back to the early days of the Federalist Society but there were a thousand other lawyers on TV yesterday chattering about impeachment. Kellyanne got the George clip because of the fascination inherent in watching two spouses take opposing sides in the biggest political war of the year when one happens to be part of the president’s inner circle. But Blitzer doesn’t want to own that, so his discomfort ends up inadvertently supporting her spin that it’s somehow dirty pool to ask her about George. He seems to agree! If he was going to bring this up, he should have owned it and treated it as newsworthy. As it is, the best he could do was stammer pitifully, “He happens to be married to you.”

And Kellyanne made him pay:

What you just quoted is said every day by other voices, but you wanted to put it in my husband’s voice because you think somehow that that will help your ratings or that you’re really sticking it to Kellyanne Conway. And let me be very clear. You didn’t stick it to Kellyanne Conway. I don’t think you stuck it to Kellyanne Conway. I think you embarrassed yourself and I’m embarrassed for you because this is CNN now? I looked up to you when I was in college and law school, I would turn on CNN to see what Wolf Blitzer had to say about war, famine, disruption abroad. I really respected you for all those years as someone that would give you the news and now it’s what somebody’s husband said on a different network.

Hoo boy. He also screwed up at the start of the exchange when he said, almost in passing, “I don’t want to talk about your marriage. I know that there are issues there.” It’s not every day you see a political interview casually allude to “issues” in the subject’s marriage, especially while asserting in the same breath that they’re not trying to get personal with their question. That’s another “tell” from Wolf that he’s not on the level about this. He wanted the irresistible freak-show drama of Kellyanne having to react to footage of her husband laying into her boss (which has been hard to come by until now given George’s aversion to appearing on TV) but he didn’t want to own up to the freak-show appeal. Oh well. He ended up with a viral clip anyway thanks to Kellyanne laying him out.