Mark Halperin’s ‘How to Beat Trump’ book sells 502 copies in first week

Political analyst Mark Halperin’s new book, “How to Beat Trump: America’s Top Political Strategists On What It Will Take,” sold 502 copies during its first week, according to an industry analysis.

Halperin served as an NBC senior political analyst and frequent MSNBC “Morning Joe” panelist until October 2017, when five women accused him of sexual harassment while at ABC News in the early 2000s. NBC dismissed the “Game Change” author shortly thereafter.

“During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me,” Halperin said following his firing. “I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain.”

The publisher of his new book, Judith Regan, told the New York Post earlier this week that Halperin should not be “condemned to … a lifetime of unemployment.”

“In this guilty-until-proven-innocent, cancel culture where everyone is condemned to death or to a lifetime of unemployment based on an accusation that’s 12 years old is criminal,” Regan, the founder of publishing company Regan Arts, told the Post.

“He’s tried to become a better person. He had a right to write it, and I have a right to publish it,” she later added. “He really has changed.”

But journalist Emily Miller, who worked with Halperin at ABC News, slammed Regan Arts as being “complicit” by helping Halperin “regain power.”

“Every person who’s helping him regain power and a public platform is complicit in re-traumatizing all the victims,” Miller told the Post in August. “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.”

Halperin told SiriusXM’s Michael Smerconish earlier this year that while he’s “not a perfect person now,” he’s “happy to be judged by perfect people.”

“I’d like to take the opportunity to again apologize to the women that I mistreated, who told their stories, and who were hurt by me. I wasn’t a perfect person when I made these mistakes,” Halperin said. “I’m not a perfect person now. I’m happy to be judged by perfect people.”

Halperin co-authored “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime” with John Heilemann while covering the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. That book sold more than 1 million copies upon its release in 2010.