MS NOW’s Alex Wagner and “Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace grappled Tuesday with mounting calls for Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner to drop out of the race amid newfound rape allegations against the Democratic nominee.
Weighing the impact of Monday’s bombshell report from Politico, which credibly detailed Platner’s alleged 2021 rape of then-girlfriend Jenny Racicot, in comparison to June reporting from the New York Times outlining the upstart politician’s patterns of “unsettling” behavior, Wallace suggested that liberal voters, media figures and the Democratic Party at large have more “soul searching” to do.
“I guess what’s so striking, though, is that the New York Times reporting from about a month ago is about, you know, on the spectrum of abuse and violence, it is certainly about unstable behavior, certainly described as toxic behavior by women,” Wallace posed during the MS NOW report. “It is on the same dial, I guess, as these allegations. What do you think the soul searching is — not just in the Democratic Party, but for all of us who cover these things?”
Wagner said that as those June reports came to light, she believed “the Platner campaign should have had a lot more explaining to do,” but admitted that there is such “profound desperation” within the Democratic Party to beat President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda and take back the Senate that moral concessions were made.
“We’re caught in a moment where this is such profound desperation to have some check on Trump’s worst impulses and there is such hunger for Democrats to control the Senate that it feels like people were willing to abide a form of dangerous masculinity that in a pre-Trump era would have been totally disqualifying,” Wagner argued. “And I think it does prompt some real soul searching about, you know, what we ask of our ‘warriors’ and what we abide and what we stomach as a society and as a party when it comes to true fighters — and what it looks like to be a man in the 21st century.”
The journalist and former MS NOW host posited that moral dilemmas within the Democratic Party over Platner’s behavior are the result of “the collapse of the patriarchy.”
“People being completely at sea and trying to figure out what it means to hold power and to keep power and to wield it in a just fashion — and the Platner campaign just raises a huge set of questions about what strength means and what crosses the line when you are a strong person,” Wagner said. “I think there’s a lot of gut-checking that needs to happen inside Democratic circles because what is abundantly clear is that this person has not had a check on his power and has felt unfettered and unapologetic about exercising that power and not offering any explanation for it, until now.”
Watch the full “Deadline: White House” segment below:
