Kellyanne Conway launches sexist attack on Nancy Pelosi — says she only backed impeachment because of 'the men around her'

In a truly bizarre and startling broadside on Friday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway lobbed a blatantly sexist accusation against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who accelerated the drive for impeaching President Donald Trump this week.

Conway accused Pelosi of doing "the worse thing a woman in power can do, which is she just changes her mind because the men around her said, 'change your mind.' We need an impeachment.'" She made the remarks to reporters at the White House.

It seemed Conway, in her warped way, was perhaps trying to make a feminist argument by saying that women should stand up to men. But the actual claim was that the only explanation for Pelosi's recent change of heart on impeachment is that she is flighty, inconsistent, and easily susceptible to pressure by men. (It's not clear why Conway assumed Pelosi couldn't have been convinced by women in Congress, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) or Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), or that she could have just changed her mind by responding to reasonable arguments by her caucus as a whole.)

This is not only a pernicious sexist stereotype, it's also a laughable description of the first woman to become speaker of the House. Pelosi has been resisting growing calls for impeachment for months, and only now changed her mind — at just about the same time that Democrats in the House overwhelmingly came around to supporting an inquiry as well. There's no mystery to explain with sexist accusations about why Pelosi changed her mind now.

Conway also pushed a line other defenders of the president have relied on, saying that it was ridiculous that Pelosi and the Democratic Party broadly decided to push for an impeachment inquiry before seeing a transcript of Trump's July 25 conversation with the Ukrainian president. But that point misses many key facts. First, an impeachment inquiry is not a verdict — investigations are almost always called before all the facts are uncovered. Second, the phone call in question in not the only event under scrutiny. And third, by the time Pelosi made her announcement, the central damning fact of the phone call had already been admitted by the president: he used his position as president to pressure Ukraine into investigating his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden.

Watch the clip below: