In new book, Kellyanne Conway aims at many targets — except Donald Trump

“ ‘Mr. Trump’ needed to come in first in the PAC straw poll,” Conway recounted that Cohen told her in a phone call. “He repeated himself. Mr. Trump needed to come in first.”

Four years later, firmly ensconced in the White House as senior counselor to President Trump, Conway said she found herself again facing the surreal, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka handed her a Post-it note with “the names of two local doctors who specialized in couples therapy.”

The marriage between Conway and her husband had erupted into public view when George T. Conway III began attacking Trump on Twitter, and Conway said Ivanka was responding to her own openness about seeking professional support.

“I noticed she had avoided putting that in a text or an email. I appreciated the information and her thoughtfulness and wanted to pursue it,” Conway recalled. “After I showed George the names, he rejected one and said a halfhearted ‘okay’ to the other while looking at his phone. We never went.”

These scenes and others are part of Conway’s nearly 500-page new memoir, “Here’s the Deal,” which The Washington Post obtained in advance of its Tuesday publication.

Part personal chronicle and part political journey, Conway’s book is filled with the sorts of barbed one-liners and bon mots that she dispensed on cable news on Trump’s behalf, becoming — depending on one’s perspective — increasingly famous or infamous.

Unlike many other Trump-focused tomes in the post-presidency era, Conway has not set out to pen a scathing tell-all, in which she distances herself from the president or administration she once served.

Her memoir is peppered with references to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — a term she uses to refer to the media and the political left, who she says were unable to accept the reality that Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton in 2016. Conway is also among the relatively small group of staffers who managed to leave the White House still in Trump’s inner circle.

Her book walks a similar line, offering what she views as a candid assessment of some of her colleagues in the White House and the media — both positive and negative — but never skewering Trump himself.

Conway reserves some of her harshest criticism for Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and a Trump senior adviser, whom she describes as “shrewd and calculating”; “a man of knowing nods, quizzical looks, and sidebar inquiries”; and someone who, as the president’s son-in-law, knew that “no matter how disastrous a personnel change or legislative attempt may be, he was unlikely to be held accountable for it.”

“There was no subject he considered beyond his expertise. Criminal justice reform. Middle East peace. The southern and northern borders. Veterans and opioids. Big Tech and small…