The New Abnormal really made it 201 episodes without anyone on the team asking, “Do we need to slap a content warning label on this?” But then Madison Cawthorn had to go and start flapping his gums about orgies.
The freshman Republican congressman has earned the ire of his colleagues after letting slip that he’s borne witness to their sexual bacchanalia, complete with—and why not—“key bumps of cocaine.” That key feature (pun noted) is exactly why New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy takes umbrage with co-host Molly Jong-Fast’s preferred term for the whole debacle: “Orgygate.” Levy simply will not stand for this erasure of the copious amounts of drugs allegedly consumed by the nation’s leaders!
Somebody else probably thinking too hard about this nightmare affair is GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy. As Levy puts it, “This is ‘unacceptable’ to Kevin McCarthy because he’s afraid that people in his district are going to be going around saying, ‘Is Kevin McCarthy participating in orgies and doing key bumps?’ So this directly has the possibility of affecting him—and that’s all he cares about.”
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Jong-Fast, meanwhile, is doing her damnedest not to picture the possibility of a raunchy Louie Gohmert getting it on with a debauched Newt Gingrich.
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Thankfully, relief descends upon the pod in the form of George Conway, a lawyer and Washington Post contributor. What he offers up is one potential explanation for the suspicious 7-hour-37-minute-sized hole in former President Donald J. Trump’s phone logs: that it wasn’t so much a document destruction conspiracy as it was good old-fashioned incompetence.
“I don’t defend Donald Trump,” Conway says—always a good start. “But I think people may be getting a little ahead of themselves about this story… I think there’s a lot of suggestion out there that there was essentially an erasure or alteration of records. I would not make that accusation at this point. We simply don’t know. And not that Donald Trump would have any moral compunction about it. It’s just that these people were not sufficiently organized or competent to conduct a cover-up that would require that level of concentration and competence.”
Instead, Conway posits, what he thinks Jan. 6 investigators will find is that Trump was sitting in a room, “transfixed,” watching the riot at the Capitol. “He’s sitting there, watching an insurrection. He’s president of the United States and he fomented the insurrection, and he’s sitting there watching gleefully, too busy to talk on the phone using the switchboard at the White House to create a record,” the lawyer theorizes. If the then-president was making calls in a way that didn’t leave a paper trail, it wasn’t deliberate.
“He’s malicious and insidious,” Conway says, “but he’s not that competent.”
Later in the episode, the co-hosts call up Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who kindly outlines what it is a secretary of state does all day. (Oversee elections for states, as it turns out.) But that’s not all. Though Griswold has been leading a vanguard to strengthen election security in Colorado, the threat of voter fraud remains terrifyingly real—all the more so because the call is coming from inside the house.
One of Griswold’s more unusual opponents for the secretary of state seat this election cycle is a Mesa County clerk named Tina Peters, who was recently indicted for an election-tampering scheme aided by none other than the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Why is someone who’s been indicted allowed to run for government office? That’s just the Colorado way, Griswold says. “Colorado is the nation’s gold standard for election access and security,” she explains, “but we’ve also become ground zero for these insider threats and conspiracies.”
To fight that, Griswold is working to tighten election infrastructure. Her first legislative priority, prohibiting open-carry within 100 feet of an election site, was signed into law earlier this week. Now the focus is on a landmark bill to disincentivize bad actors like Peters from compromising or illegally accessing voting equipment. If you do, Griswold says, “you’re going to go to jail. It’s going to be a felony.”
But despite all the optimism, there’s still room for a healthy dose of concern. “I think we’re seeing the groundwork so that the next time an extreme elected official or candidate does not want to accept the results of a free and fair election, it will be easier for them to try to take their seats, no matter the results,” Griswold says, “which is very frightening for the future of this country. And it underscores the need to make sure that election-deniers do not become secretaries of state, in that we continue to have free and fair elections for all Republican, independent, and Democratic voters in this country.”
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