Attorney George Conway and CNN anchor Jim Acosta used a joint appearance published by The Bulwark to ridicule President Trump's claim that he kept more promises than he made, with Conway describing the president as "a busted fire hydrant of bullshit" and declaring him the greatest practitioner of political exaggeration in history.
The exchange centered on a remark Trump has repeated about his own record. "I actually had a Democrat say, you know, whether you like them or not, he made a lot of promises, and he kept more promises than he made," Trump said, according to the transcript of the video. "I actually kept more, I did more things than I promised. Promises made promises. You kept more promises than he made, like by 600%."
Conway, a conservative lawyer and longtime Trump critic, seized on the arithmetic. "I don't know. Maybe this is the same kind of Trump math that he does with the drug pricing," he said. Conway went further, offering what he called a back-handed compliment: "He is the greatest of all time when it comes to bullshitting people."
The Bulwark published the video through its account @BulwarkOnline, carrying the headline quote from Conway in the post text. The two men did not stop at the promise claim. They walked through a list of what they described as broken commitments, starting with foreign wars and energy policy.
"No more forever wars. Let's get rid of the war mongers," Conway said, reciting a slogan from Trump's campaigns before turning to fuel prices. "Hello, we're in the middle of an energy crisis in this country. We're buying gas and fuel from Russia because of his goddamn war in the Middle East. That's why that is a promise broken."
Acosta picked up the thread and referenced the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a large share of the world's seaborne oil passes. "Thanks to the heroes of the U.S. military, we also now have total control of the Strait of Hormones," Acosta said, quoting a version of the president's language and repeating the malapropism. "You know, we have two of them."
The transcript shows Acosta pressing the contradiction between the claim of control and the state of the oil market. "Again, let's see. This is what I'm sorry about. Our oil is coming through the strait today that it was before the war. Do you believe that one?" he said.
Acosta then quoted a line he attributed to the president about retail fuel prices. "Refiners and retailers need to start dropping their prices right now. We want we're getting them so much oil. So much more oil is coming in now that that the Strait of Hormones was closed and then we closed it on the Iranians and now it's, he says, you know, it's the strait of Trump, I guess, or the strait of America. The gas is going to be cheaper now than it ever was."
The segment turned back to Conway, who reached for a folksy image to describe the volume of the claims. "As my mother would say, it's getting deep around here. I don't have my boots on. I mean, he is so the Strait of Hormones, he's so full of shit. Again, it's the bullshitting. You know, it's sort of uncontrolled. He's like a busted fire hydrant of bullshit now."
The clip drew attention across social media after The Bulwark posted it, with the phrase "busted fire hydrant of bullshit" circulating among accounts that amplify criticism of the president. Acosta, a CNN anchor, and Conway, who rose to prominence as a conservative attorney before becoming one of the president's most vocal Republican critics, have appeared together repeatedly during Trump's second term.
The underlying claim at the center of the exchange — that Trump kept more promises than he made, or exceeded his own commitments by a margin of six hundred percent — is the president's own characterization of his record and is not a figure that has been independently verified. The same is true of the statements attributed in the clip about the Strait of Hormuz, oil shipments and gasoline prices. Next News Network could not independently verify those claims.
The back-and-forth reflects a broader pattern in coverage of the president's second term, in which his own descriptions of his achievements become the subject of fact-check segments and social media clips. Conway and Acosta's exchange is the latest in a series of media appearances in which the two men have catalogued what they describe as the gap between the president's promises and his results.
Neither the White House nor representatives for the president responded to the remarks in the clip as of publication.
Our Take
George Conway calling anyone a "busted fire hydrant of bullshit" is rich coming from a man who spent years as a Republican operative and then reinvented himself as a cable news moralist the moment it became profitable. The left loves to parade Conway around as proof that even conservatives can't stand Trump, but Conway's conversion wasn't a matter of conscience — it was a matter of branding. He didn't discover principles; he discovered a market.
That said, the promise claim itself deserves scrutiny, and not of the kind that comes from a man who has made a second career out of insult comedy. "Kept more promises than he made" is a rhetorical flourish, the kind of line any politician might toss out at a rally, and treating it as a falsifiable statistic is exactly the sort of fake precision the press loves when it wants to generate a segment. Acosta's decision to repeat "Strait of Hormones" for laughs tells you everything about how seriously this was meant to be taken.
What's actually worth noting is that the clip says nothing about whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago. It says everything about the media ecosystem that amplified it. Conway and Acosta aren't reporting on energy prices or foreign wars — they're performing for an audience that already agrees with them, and the "busted fire hydrant" line is the product they're selling. If the president's promises are genuinely broken, that case can be made with numbers and documents, not with a punchline about his spelling.
Conservatives should resist the temptation to treat every Conway broadside as a five-alarm fire. He's a man with a grudge and a book to sell, and the people cheering him on today will discard him the moment he stops being useful. The president's record will be judged at the ballot box, not in a Bulwark video clip.
