So you want to talk about blow-jobs-for-favors, Mr. T?
Okay, let’s go there.
In case you haven’t heard, Donald Trump reposted a mean-girl type meme implying a certain other candidate advanced her career by offering sexual favors. Right, so let’s go there, Mr. T. Here are some questions that have become fair game in the light of this post, and I hope journalists and event moderators have the grit to ask them in the months to come:
- Have you, Mr. Trump, ever asked a woman you employed for a blow job (to use the exact phrase you reposted) as a condition of her advancement?
- Do you believe women usually advance their careers by offering sexual favors? In your world view, do you see this as normal?
- Do you think men who ask for such things should be fired for abuse of their authority? Or is a man receiving a sex-for-advancement quid-pro-quo fine with you?
- Do you believe power should only flow from white men, and that it is actually an ideal of the “MAGA” future you envision that white men in positions of power should continue to expect blow jobs?
- If you are sent to prison for the 34 felonies of which you have been convicted (thus far) do you anticipate your views on blow jobs and power hierarchies might change?
My guess is you, like me, believe the media would never dare ask such inappropriate questions. But what they have done, instead, is yet again amplify Trump’s inappropriate bullying a thousand-fold. If this horrid meme only lived on his personal platform (let’s call it by its true name: Lies Anti-Social), then it would have gone unnoticed by all but a few thousand sniggering, hard-core MAGA followers.
Instead, it’s all over the news — and bloggers, even on the best platforms, are commenting on it. And now I’m sucked in to this vortex too! Argh ! But I am not repeating the slur, I am not reporting the meme. And I would urge my fellow bloggers not to do what the media does.
Whenever you repeat Trump’s insults and lies you magnify them. You spread the poison even as you “tut-tut” critique them. Trump’s intended target gets tarred with the slur all over again. This is his plan. This is why he does it: he gets the media to do his dirty work for him in the guise of news.
This is what middle school mean girls do: pass along slander: “Did you hear what Bethany said about Meghan?” There is zero news value in it, but the high emotion of these insults spikes our adrenaline levels. It excites us. It outrages us. And that high emotion fuses the insult into our neural pathways, where it lingers like a virus. It is bad for us, but, oh, we get so addicted to it. So journos and bloggers know writing about it will attract the attention of readers.
Trump’s insults are America’s meth — he offers a fast, cheap hit of outrage that is near impossible to resist. And every journalist and blogger who peddles Trump’s insults is no better than a meth dealer.
Just say no. Don’t write about it. Don’t read about it, and most of all, do not report it.
But this is not what the media is doing. Every recent story about Harris’ rise in the polls is accompanied by some version of this sentence “Trump’s campaign is floundering in response, because they still have not found a line of attack on Harris that works.”
A line of attack?
Now, it is probably true that this is all Trump’s campaign is searching for. But these same articles are normalizing making presidential elections all about finding the right “attack.” That is an insult both to our elections and to the electorate.
In short, the media have become like the crowd surrounding a schoolyard bully as he picks on a classmate. They are the ones chanting “Fight, fight, fight!” and egging the bully on.
What if instead, the crowd simply yelled at the bully to stop being a dick?
So, I think it’s time to make this our simple response to Trump, and what better opportunity than this, while he’s posting slurs about blow jobs:
Mr. Trump, stop being a dick.
Tim Ward is the co-author of Pro Truth: A Practical Plan for Putting Truth Back into Politics
