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Why Don’t You Care about Trump’s Treatment of Women?
Over the weekend news of a new book release by disgraced former ABC political analyst Mark Halperin broke from Politico,
Mark Halperin has a book deal, for which he interviewed more than 75 top Democratic strategists: https://t.co/wrh7AsJOzf pic.twitter.com/LpQHpDTDD0
— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) August 18, 2019
In a New York Post article about the controversy, his victims spoke out,
“This is appalling and so upsetting,” journalist and author Emily Miller told The Post.
Miller was harassed by Halperin when they worked together at ABC News and she was his junior.
“Men like him don’t change. He spent decades using his position of power in the media to sexually assault women. He hasn’t even apologized to his victims!” Miller said.
“Every person who’s helping him regain power and a public platform is complicit in retraumatizing all the victims.”
Eleanor McManus — a former CNN producer, who encountered Halperin’s inappropriate behavior when first trying to get a media job — echoed Miller’s concerns.
“He leveraged his position as a prominent journalist to prey on women,” McManus told The Post via email.
“He has yet to take responsibility for his actions by apologizing to his victims or demonstrating genuine contrition. Giving him a book once again puts him in a position of authority and that is a slap to all the women that he has victimized.”
Every single prominent Democratic strategist, all of whom publicly decry the President’s (admittedly terrible) treatment of women spoke to Halperin for his book, lending him gravitas and publicity to help him move past his #MeToo moment.
In a rare and commendable display of journalism, CNN’s Oliver Darcy has spent the weekend contacting those Halperin interviewed asking them why they did so. Here is one of the responses:
One of ppl who spoke to Halperin for his book is Anita Dunn. Dunn is managing director at SKDKnickerbocker which does work w/Time's Up. Dunn didn't respond to my calls, but an SKD spox tells me, "Anita cares about beating Donald Trump, that is the only reason she participated."
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 18, 2019
Here’s the thing they don’t seem to get: you don’t beat Donald Trump by excusing men of accused of similarly disgusting patterns of behavior. The Left have no moral legitimacy to say that Donald Trump’s history with women is disqualifying while looking the other way when their men do the same.
Former Obama official David Axelrod hit the right note with an apology about his participation in the project, but most of the strategists Halperin spoke to refused to offer Darcy comment or apologize for participating.
To those who have asked, I have known Mark Halperin as a reporter for 25 years. He emailed me three questions about the 2020 race for a book he was writing and I replied in a few sentences, without giving enough thought to how my participation would be used or interpreted.
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) August 18, 2019
One Twitter commenter inadvertently hit problem with the Left’s refusal to hold Halperin to account:
What’s more important punishing Mark or defeating Trump?
— TV-MA-LSV (@danielgjohnson) August 18, 2019
You don’t defeat Trump without punishing Mark. It’s not an either-or. If men behaving badly is disqualifying, then it’s bad for the President, before he was President or while he’s in office, and it’s also bad for a political operative and executive at a major news network.
Published in General
I’m not sure “before” matters. I do believe people can change. Halperin still “holds office” so his behavior while in office is what matters. What has the President done while in office that comes anywhere close to what this Halperin perv has done? Unfounded accusations don’t count. Particularly when coming from a class of people who think nothing of telling the most egregious lies to destroy their political opponents. (cf Justice Kavanaugh.)
If men behaving badly is disqualifying, there are a lot of people on the left who need to lose their jobs long before we rise to the level of the President’s alleged bad behavior.
For me the question is not whether or not I care, but rather what I plan to do about it, given that I do care. I choose to forgive the behavior because I think that the benefits of his presidency make him the better choice for the country than any of the other alternatives.
What are the chances that an uber-conventional lefty MSM journo like Halperin has any functional campaign ideas that are not already known to all? What super-strategic advantage would be lost to the left by giving this guy the same treatment a non-lefty would get for his egregious misbehavior?
It is extraordinarily Clinton-like that Halperin and his enablers have managed to frame the matter as a stark choice between (a) rejecting Halperin or (b) beating Trump. Seems to me they are not mutually exclusive and that (a) gives the left a stronger, more consistent moral footing in the MeToo perception arena.
What the evidence has shown, is that President Trump likely engaged in extra-marital affairs with women who consensually engaged in those affairs with him. Although we may deplore the actions, it is not “admittedly terrible” in the sense of using power over a subordinate to force her to engage in sexual activities if she wants to advance her career. I may have missed it, but I do not remember any evidence that the President was doing this to subordinates. The equivalence drawn here is wrong. The President’s dishonorable actions are not as bad as those of Halperin and other Liberals and Democrats.
I tend to agree with you, Patrick. It seems extremely unlikely to me that Trump could get away with…well, with anything approaching a sexual assault or rape charge given, as Drew says, how far and far back his opponents were willing to go to defeat his SCOTUS pick.
As I keep pointing out, Trump’s p***y-grabbing was confined, as far as we know, to words and words moreover spoken in a very particular context. And even then, the full sentence indicated, even bragged of, the consent of his “victims.” He was (is?) kind of a jerk in one of the recognizable ways that men can be jerks, but that hardly makes him a novelty in political Washington.
What terrible treatment of women? Are there five examples, or five thousand?
What is a bane to many celebrities is an advantage for Trump. He’s had every indiscretion in his life written into the pages of the tabloids, so there’s nothing new there to most people. OTOH, Democrats keep finding new dirt on their people (hello, Governor Northam), and have to scramble to get it out of what headlines they do print.
I am sick and tired of hearing about men behaving badly. In my 70 plus years of life I have seen many instances of women behaving badly too and are fully capable of being just as vicious and controlling as men. It’s my firm belief that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
Men behaving badly are cads, but women behaving badly are liberated.
Let’s not forget even men rock the cradle now and then . . .
@bethanymandel
This entire thing is why we got Trump. You can’t have one standard for one side and another standard for the other side and expect to be taken seriously. Ben Shapiro gets into this with regard to a different statement by the left but it is all of a piece. (Some salty language used.)
The mindset of those here who talked to Halperin is the same as the ones in recent months who have been sympathetic to the rehabilitation of Al Franken. In both cases the feeling is these guys were only used as fodder to get Trump on his treatment of women, and since it didn’t work why should they suffer?
It just highlights the situational outrage — they were never going to care about what Mark Halperin did or didn’t do with women at ABC News as a stand-alone issue and don’t see the need to keep shunning the poor guy if nobody’s outraged at Trump for his treatment of women. (It’s also an apples and oranges situation that they’re trying to make comparable, in that Trump was a jerk for cheating on his wives, but Trump’s never been accused of sexually harassing women, other than with the recanted claim by Ivanna during the first divorce proceeding. That takes wanting to welcome Halperin back into the fold because Trump’s still president to a different level, in that you now also have to not care about the women who made the harassment claims.)
I thought Mika Brzezinski was trying to organize an apology tour for this guy several months ago.
Me too, GWW. Not to mention women assisting men in behaving badly, or benefiting by men behaving badly whilst pretending innocence. Etc.
Men compartmentalize more than women do (generally).* Or maybe it’s just that Trump didn’t ever talk about men letting him grab our [redacteds]. Or maybe we’re just pigs and don’t care.
Whatever the reason, women seem to be considerably less charitable regarding Trump’s comments, affair(s), etc. than menfolk.
_________________
* And other qualifiers, #notallwomens, weasel words, and get-out-of-jail-free cards as needed.
So, just exatly when will he be released from purgatory, or whatever deeper hell hw has been assigned? Jim Geraghty was beting the same drum. How dare he show his face in public!
Yes, his behavior was inexcusable, but that aside, was he bad at his job? Why should he not be pursuing some means of sustenance? Is he an outcast, forever banished, allowed no more than fire and water as if in ancient Rome?
An unrepentant Mark Halperin deserves nothing from any of us, but please, this unforgiving vindictivness is conduct no better than his. Even convicted murderers have been shown better treatment.
“Here’s the thing they don’t seem to get: you don’t beat Donald Trump by excusing men of accused of similarly disgusting patterns of behavior. The Left have no moral legitimacy to say that Donald Trump’s history with women is disqualifying while looking the other way when their men do the same.”
The left has no moral authority, period. And neither do ‘the right’ for that matter.
I’ve come to loathe the “moralism card” played by both sides. The arrogance of moral pride is sickening.
We know that males are inherently predatory and females inherently expect and must deal with this reality. Trying to enforce civilization through public and permanent shaming and shunning is backfiring on civilization itself. This is cruelty inflicted on everyone.
I also have a problem with the sloppy thinking Mrs. Mandel exhibits here.
Sexual harassment is one category, but it seems Mandel wants enforcement of a the code of chivalry here when conflating Trump and Halperin.
Women WILL let you ____ ____ if you are rich and famous. Not ALL women, but a helluva lot of them. So who’s to blame?
I find many females strangely irresponsible and blind to their own personal agency or that of their gender. They continue to take on a passive solipsistic role in their advocacy such that they negate their own claims. Toughen up, girls, or we can go back to the way it was. You can’t have both.
I agree with both of you. It looks like Halperin was “disgraced” at the height of the MeToo hysteria. Some of the allegations may be true, for all that I know, but I don’t have time to look into these (or others) in detail.
I worry that there’s a witch-hunt mentality behind allegations such as these. We saw this with Justice Kavanaugh. There is a serious danger of character assassination, so I prefer to withhold judgment until there has been a trial, and there is almost never a trial.
None of this means that Halperin was innocent.
I’ve just been reading a biography of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, whose wife, Sarah Jennings, was a prime mover behind the scenes in helping to advance his illustrious military career. Furthermore, she used her friendship with Queen Anne to influence parliamentary politics at the time and to enhance the Churchill coffers. The monumental Blenheim Palace, the building of which she oversaw, is a tribute to her determination as much as it is to John Churchill’s spectacular success on the battlefields of Europe. This took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, long before women’s liberation and more than 200 years before women even had the right to vote.
There are degrees of wrong, but apparently not degrees of ‘gotcha’.
If someone cheats on his (or her) wife, it is a sin against G-d. It is a cruelty in an intimate relationship.
If someone sexually harasses an underling, it is destructive of a workplace and a crime. It is the basis for a lawsuit, and it breaks down trust within a much larger group than a marriage (for people reading this in the future, a marriage was once understood to involve only two people).
Additionally, cries of, “Heyyyyyy Christians! A Republican committed one of your sin-things which are kinda weird to us, but whatevs – now you have to stone him or excommittiate him or something, but anyway, you have to kick him out of Congress and let us put one of ours in because Bible!” should properly be met with mild confusion and invitations to local Bible studies classes.
Yeah. I’m not even a Christian and I’m getting tired of that.
Ah, but there is a trial in public opinion when a man is accused and his name is printed in the newspaper. He is immediately judged guilty, his life is ruined, and the accuser enjoys her 15 minutes of fame and maybe even a boost in her career. It’s a huge travesty of justice as we can never know who is telling the truth in a he said she said case where there is no corroborating evidence.
While I agree that is true in the aggregate, it definitely does not apply to Halperin. He got his start, and probably modeled his behavior, on his mentor Peter Jennings of ABC, who was notorious for the Jeffrey Epstein /Harvey Weinstein amount of time and energy he put into harassing young women. I look back on what women had to put up with when I was a young man and agree that, on balance, this movement for all it’s excesses is progress. I just don’t see how we can devise a way to prevent women from using their power in the opposite direction.
Not to worry for women and what they have had to put up with as I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t enjoy being admired by a man as long as it’s within the bounds of propriety. The plain fact is that sexual attraction is a fact of life. It’s none of our business if a man makes unwanted advances to a woman or a woman makes unwanted advances to a man — unless is a crime is involved. It’s up to the persons concerned to let the offending party know that he or she is out of line. We should all be suspicious when a woman comes out of nowhere to accuse a man of unwanted advances some 20 years after the fact and extremely suspicious if that man is wealthy and/or famous.
It appears that Mika got shot down pretty quickly.
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann had the best political TV show for the the 2016 election, “With All Due Respect.” Halperin was the most prescient analyst in 2016, he could see the possibility of Trump pulling an inside straight in the upper Midwest. In 2016, Halperin also asked Trump straight questions with respect and without snark.
On the womanizing scale, I understand that Halperin was a womanizer at the level of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. (There are allegations that both Trump and Clinton, on occasion, went beyond being jerks, to the level of assault.) But it appears that Mark Halperin did not engage in serial overt sexual assault as shown by Michael Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes. (In other words, Mark Halperin was a jerk, not a criminal.) I hope that Mark Halperin can come back. He had just gotten married and had had a baby when the “me too” storm hit.
It appears that Mark Halperin’s career was swept as was Al Franken’s. Both of those strike me as a bit of over-kill, especially given how Trump and Clinton managed to out-brazen their accusers.
Perhaps Mark Halperin will be able to make a come-back at the level of Richard Nixon, whose insights were appreciated by many Presidents and political figures after Watergate.
I ordered Mark Halperin’s book as a level of support when it was announced.
I would love to hear his insights on podcasts.
The other issue is opportunists like Kirsten Gillibrand who made her bones on driving Al Franken out of the Senate. But that will await a different post/comment.
No.
I’ll spot you the general term ‘womanizer’ to cover both infidelity or coercing an underling into sex, but you simply cannot then proceed to claim that these things are at the same level.
That is false. They are clearly not at the same level. This can be demonstrated in their legal consequences, in their level of cultural opprobrium, and in the quantity of damage done.
I think that there are several different levels.