On Morning Joe Monday morning, the panelists and co-hosts discussed The New York Times "hit piece" on Donald Trump published over the weekend, in which his interactions with female employees and contestants in his beauty pageants were discussed at length.
The portrait of the presumptive Republican nominee was not flattering, and yet co-host Joe Scarborough insisted that because the woman whose story bookends the article insisted that "she was told this was not going to be a hit piece," the incidents itemized in it don't amount to a portrait of a man who engages in serial sexual harassment.
According to Scarborough, there were only two incidents that rose to the level of "bad behavior" -- because "two" is clearly the presidential standard -- the first involving Temple Taggart, the 1997 Miss Universe contestant who found it wildly "inappropriate" that Trump was kissing her and other contestants on the mouth while married to Marla Maples, and the second being the 26-year-old model Trump tried to cajole into putting on a bikini for him within minutes of meeting him at a pool party.
"I will tell you -- that’s not a pleasant thing,” Scarborough said. “In the thousands and thousands and thousands of receptions I’ve had, [however] people have come up, women have come up, of all ages, and kissed me on the lips. I don’t like it, I wish they wouldn’t have -- but I wouldn’t run to The New York Times."
As for the woman Trump asked to don a bikini for his pleasure, Scarborough said that it's important to note that she told the Times that she did, in fact, put it on and after Trump "brought me out to the pool and said, ‘That is a stunning Trump girl, isn’t it?'"
It should be noted that his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, wasn't entirely pleased by the tenor of this conversation.
Watch the entire clip below via MSNBC.
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