During his State of the Union, President Donald Trump was trying to make the point how dangerous our refugee policy is for the people coming here.

He sated that “One in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.”

That is a horrifying statistic.  Having a policy that is not a people magnet, would discourage waves a migrants to head north, and there by expose fewer women to the predators who take advantage of them.

This is a mostly legitimate argument.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has some crazy effects.

Effects like getting major American media outlets to downplay sexual assault to own Trump.

Fact check: Trump says “1 in 3 women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” But there’s less to that number than meets the eye. https://t.co/Rpz00zdH4L

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 6, 2019

This is WaPo’s live fact check of Trump’s statement.

The White House attributes the 1-in-3 estimate to a 2017 report by Doctors Without Borders. But there’s less to that number than meets the eye.

Trump states as a fact that 1 out of 3 women traveling through Mexico is sexually assaulted. But the report did not conduct a random-sample survey that could be applied to all migrant women. Instead, the group interviewed nearly 500 people whom its doctors treated, of which 12 percent were women. So the statistic is derived from the experiences of 56 women and cannot necessarily be considered representative of all migrant women.

In the interviews, 31.4 percent of women said they were “sexually abused” on the journey, not “sexually assaulted” as Trump says. Considering only rape and other forms of direct sexual violence, 10.7 percent of the women who were interviewed said they were affected during their journey.

“Your sampling is not proper statistical gathering” and “sexual abuse is not sexual assault” are both very shitty arguments to make.

It comes across as “we don’t need a wall because the raping of migrant women by coyotes isn’t as bad as Trump says it is.”

Considering that WaPo would be among the first to claim and a misplaced hand during an awkward hug by Trump would qualify as sexual assault by the President, this is one hell of a take.

When you hate Trump so much that you are wiling to engage in hand-waving dismissal of the sexual exploitation of thousands of women just to counter one of his points, you probably need to do some deep soul searching.