Everyone Feels Bad About Monica Lewinsky—Even George Conway

In the new Impeachment: American Crime Story, George Conway is portrayed as a dashing young lawyer.

“They found some guy who kind of looks like me,” the Trump critic tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Or looks like the way I did in the 1980s and 1990s, before I got old. I could still grow the hair long.”

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Looks aside, Molly says she does want to give Conway “a hard time” for his part in “enabling” the Clinton-Lewinsky coverage and the president’s subsequent impeachment. Does he regret his role in the saga?

No, Conway says. He doesn’t regret helping take down former President Bill Clinton, especially in the post-MeToo era. But he does “feel bad for what happened to Monica.”

Molly says she’s been thinking about “the apology that we owe Monica. She was 21 years old in an internship with a man, a powerful man with a history of sexual harassment and assault who had allegations against him and who was also just, like, a Casanova. And then, somehow, this is all her fault. The media made it all her fault.”

Conway, for his part, says he had no idea “that it was going to be awful for Monica. I thought it was gonna be awful for Bill... it was impossible to fully foresee how the whole thing would play out… Frankly, I thought she was going to be portrayed as a victim of this guy.”

Molly still can’t believe it was liberals—including her own mother—who said “horrible, horrible, horrible things. I don’t even understand it.”

“It was the most amazing thing to me to watch all of these liberals do that,” Conway says. “Because if this had been a woman doing what she did with a Republican president, oh, that woman would have been the victim in a heartbeat.”

Also in the conversation, Conway discusses Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s threats and whether there’ll be a Jan. 6 repeat, as well as what the new Texas abortion law portends for Roe v. Wade.

Later in the episode, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock, author of The Afghanistan Papers, talks about American officials’ doublespeak on Afghanistan over the last 20 years. He also shares with Molly his take on how Michael Flynn went from respected, level-headed three-star general to QAnon crank.

Finally, Georgia state Sen. Jen Jordan, who’s running for attorney general, talks about how gerrymandering is likely to produce more Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whether Texas’ abortion ban will inspire Republicans to replicate it in Georgia.

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