The big hype leading into Sunday’s American Idol Season 19 premiere centered on the audition by Claudia Conway, the 16-year-old daughter of former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. Claudia insisted, both on her recently revived Twitter account and onscreen in the audition room, that going on Idol was an “amazing opportunity” for her to establish her own identity and pursue her long-held dream of evolving from TikTok star to pop star; Claudia’s attorney father George, who accompanied her to the Idol set, even said Sunday through tears that he “couldn’t imagine anything that would make her happier than to do this.”
But the backlash to Claudia’s TV appearance nonetheless has been immediate, intense… and not unjustified. After a nonstop torrent of Sunday-evening Twitter protests, this outrage was distilled in a widely tweeted Variety op-ed titled “How ‘American Idol’ Used Claudia Conway.”
