Trump himself was accused of domestic assault by his first wife, Ivana Trump, in their 1990 divorce deposition, obtained by one of Donald’s Trump’s biographers, Harry Hurt III. In “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” Hurt wrote that Donald Trump became enraged after scalp reduction surgery left him in pain, and blamed his then-wife, who had recommended the doctor. Hurt describes Trump pinning back Ivana’s arms and ripping out her hair by the handful “as if he is trying to make her feel the same kind of pain that he is feeling.” Then, she told friends, Trump raped her. (Ivana Trump later issued a statement saying she hadn’t meant rape in a “literal or criminal sense.”)

It’s fair to think that Trump sets the bar for what’s considered acceptable in this White House. Porter’s father, Roger Porter, a Harvard professor who worked for presidents including Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, once wrote of how presidents create administrative cultures: “Scholars of management today write much about the ‘tone at the top.’ Like all presidents, Gerald Ford established a tone that permeated the executive branch.” Trump, evidently, established one as well.

Porter and both of his ex-wives are Mormons, and, speaking to The Intercept, Willoughby described confiding in a Mormon official about her husband’s fits of rage. She was told to think about how Porter’s career might suffer if she spoke out. Powerful people in Washington seem to have been similarly worried, first and foremost, about protecting the ambitious and pedigreed young man.

Porter once worked for Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and in The Daily Mail, the senator categorically dismissed the accusations and, whether he meant to or not, the women making them. “Shame on any publication that would print this — and shame on the politically motivated, morally bankrupt character assassins that would attempt to sully a man’s good name,” he said.

Later, after the black-eye photograph of Holderness was published, Hatch issued a statement saying that domestic violence is “abhorrent.” But after that, he gave an interview in which he said he hoped Porter would “keep a stiff upper lip” and not resign. “If I could find more people like him, I would hire them,” said Hatch, describing Porter as “basically a good person.”

It’s not really a surprise that Hatch, who once said that Trump’s presidency could become the greatest ever, would treat serious allegations of abusing women as a personal foible unrelated to one’s professional capabilities. You basically have to see things that way to support Trump in the first place. The reasons that Porter didn’t belong in any White House are the reasons he fit in in this one.