It took Chris Pappas 3 hours and 28 minutes to say Graham Platner must go. It’s been 3 years, 1 month, and 29 days since a jury found Trump liable for sexual assault—and John Sununu took his endorsement anyway.
At 3:23 p.m. on Monday, Politico published an account from a woman who said Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner sexually assaulted her in 2021. Platner denies the allegation.
By 6:51 p.m.—about three and a half hours later—Chris Pappas, the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, had posted his answer: “The allegations against Graham Platner are reprehensible, and he must step aside.”
Pappas was not alone. Within hours of the Politico story, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Platner should “immediately withdraw,” and warned that the committee “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had both backed him, pulled their support the same day. “These allegations are very serious and credible,” Khanna wrote. “Graham Platner should drop out.”
That is accountability measured in hours, not years.
Immediately after the Politico piece went up, Sununu shot accusations at Pappas.
“For weeks, Chris Pappas has refused to condemn Graham Platner’s campaign, character, or conduct, that needs to end today. Graham Platner does not represent New England values and is unfit to serve. Either Chris Pappas supports Platner, or he’s too scared of the radical left to do the right thing. Both are deeply wrong for New Hampshire.” Sununu told a conservative blog.
Pappas condemned Platner before Sununu’s comments made it to print.
So the question turns back on Sununu and other Republicans in New Hampshire: when will they apply the same standard to the leader of their own party?
In 2023, a federal civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s and for defaming her when he denied it, ordering him to pay $5 million. The trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, later wrote that Carroll proved Trump raped her “as many people commonly understand the word.”
A second jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million for continuing to defame her. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, leaving the verdict in place.
At least 28 women have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s.
New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte once condemned Trump for his sexual assault allegations, but she has since backtracked.
In October 2016, after the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, while running for a second term in the US Senate, Ayotte declared she “cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” and said she would write in Mike Pence instead.
Eight years later, running for governor, Ayotte endorsed Trump anyway. “This election is now a choice between Trump and Biden,” she said in March 2024, “and my choice is President Trump.”
Nothing about Trump’s record of sexual assault allegations had been refuted in the interim—in fact, by then a civil jury had found him liable for sexual abuse. What changed was that endorsing him had become useful.
John Sununu almost got there.
On the eve of the January 2024 New Hampshire presidential primary—eight months after the Carroll verdict—Sununu published an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader titled “Donald Trump is a loser.”
In his op-ed, Sununu attacked Trump for being weak electorally and endorsed Nikki Haley, but never once touched on his long record of reported sexual assaults of women throughout Trump’s life.
Then, this February, Trump praised Sununu as an “America First Patriot” on Truth Social and handed him his “Complete and Total Endorsement” in the Senate primary. Sununu took it.
It has been 3 years, 1 month, and 29 days since a civil jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse. In that time, Sununu never demanded that Trump answer for the verdict, or for the at least 27 other women who have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct.
This is the contrast the Platner episode actually reveals.
It took Chris Pappas about three and a half hours to call for a member of his own party to step aside over a sexual assault allegation. It has been more than three years since a jury found the leader of the Republican Party liable for sexual assault.
Sununu has spent years ignoring the biggest problem in his party.
Pappas did it in an afternoon.
