Mark Halperin Thinks Sexual Assault is Legal

With the media narrative over the New York Times‘ piece on Donald Trump‘s treatment of women still gelling, the Morning Joe crew has firmly ensconced itself on Team Trump-is-a Pig-So-What’s-the-Big-Deal, led by chief narrative spaghetti-thrower Mark Halperin. His molten take on the story is that if this is the best they could find, Trump should be “celebrating,” which may be true in some sense, but which doesn’t make the rest of Halperin’s assessment any less gobsmacking:

There’s some troubling things in the piece, but there’s nothing illegal, there’s nothing even kind of like beyond boorish or politically incorrect, which is built into the Donald Trump brand.

That’s only true if things like workplace sexual harassment and sexual assault are “legal,” and Halperin’s attitude shows exactly why things can be so difficult for women who don’t play along to get along. Halperin thinks that this constitutes “being boorish”:

Mr. Houraney said in a recent interview that he was shocked by Mr. Trump’s response after he made clear that he and Ms. Harth were monogamous.

“He said: ‘Well, there’s always a first time. I am going after her,’ ” Mr. Houraney recalled, adding: “I thought the man was joking. I laughed. He said, ‘I am serious.’ ”

By the time the three of them were having dinner at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel the next night, Mr. Trump’s advances had turned physical, Ms. Harth said in the deposition.

“Basically he name-dropped throughout that dinner, when he wasn’t groping me under the table,” she testified. “Let me just say, this was a very traumatic thing working for him.”

Now, that woman has since clammed up, but she stood by her account, and what she described was both sexual assault and sexual harassment. Those things are illegal, as are many of the other allegations made in the piece. That we have come to expect such behavior from men like Donald Trump isn’t a mitigation of it, it is the cause of it. It’s also likely why there isn’t more than this handful of allegations in the piece, because the ways in which such allegations are treated by people like Halperin makes women less likely to report them. Powerful men always assert that women make things up for personal gain, and men like Halperin never stop to ask what personal gain is to be had by being disbelieved and shamed, and simultaneously alienating every potential employer or ally, or the person powerful enough to believe he can behave this way without repercussion.

Politically speaking, Halperin would have been right if this were still the Republican primary, where being a pig is a feature, not a bug, but now that Donald Trump is out in the wider world of sane people, things like this and his secret imaginary PR man who is totally real and just lives in Canada will take a toll that no one will see coming.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.