President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies may pursue "evil and nefarious" goals — including potentially manipulating government data to make the administration look better — but according to conservative attorney and commentator George Conway, they remain too "incompetent" to pull it off.

Conway, who was previously married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump's senior counselor during his first term, has become one of the more prominent and vocal conservative critics of the president's MAGA political agenda. He helped co-found The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump political action committee formed by current and former Republicans ahead of the 2020 election, and has made numerous media appearances over the years.

One of his latest appearances came as a guest on the "Fast Politics" podcast with host Molly Jong-Fast, where the conversation opened with data from a new report that has dumped cold water on Trump's claims about leading the United States into a new economic "golden age." Jong-Fast explained that she asked University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers whether the Trump administration could "fudge" the data to make it look better for the president, and said he insisted they would not be able to do much. The stakes of that question reach well beyond the podcast, since the government's widely watched economic indicators are compiled by career statisticians and serve as the factual baseline that businesses, investors and policymakers rely on.

While stressing that he is not familiar with the intricate processes behind the economic data, Conway argued that the situation shows Trumpworld remains too "incompetent" to achieve its more dastardly ends.

"I don't profess to know anything about how these economic numbers are, you know, what the processes are. I do understand that it's a very complex process," Conway said. "And if Justin says that, you know, they don't really have the capacity to do it — cause remember, you know, they're evil and nefarious, and they're mal-intentioned, but they're incompetent."

He continued: "There are always adjustments to these numbers because it's just, when they issue these numbers, they issue them, you know, on the basis of the data they have, and then more data comes in and more retrospective data, and so they do adjust them over time. So I don't know that there's, you know, I would think that if they were being corrupt, these numbers would not have changed. So I think there's just a limit to the amount of control that they have over these numbers. And if they ever tried to mess with those numbers too much, just guessing here, speculating, using my suspicious antennae as a lawyer, somebody would, you know, leak it to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and then there would be a huge hullabaloo."

Elsewhere in the conversation, Conway echoed the argument that Trump's struggling economy is causing voters to finally take him to task for his blatant corruption, and suggested that the president was risking the same downfall as his European far-right ally, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

"It sort of reminds me, I keep talking about it, but it reminds me a little bit of what I think happened in Hungary or what I've been told happened in Hungary," Conway said. "What [current Hungarian PM Péter] Magyar did there was to connect the people's economic wellbeing to the corruption that they could see. And I think people, if everything were going great, I think people would be a little more tolerant of the corruption as just sort of inside baseball, but it's just staring them in the face now."