The play behind Melania Trump's delayed defense of her nude pictures

As part of the Trump family's larger efforts to snatch every MAGA dupe's nickel in the last days of the campaign season, Melania Trump — well, someone purporting to be Melania Trump, anyway — wrote a book. While her husband, Donald Trump, travels around the country with white nationalist Laura Loomer by his handsy side, Melania Trump has been releasing book promotion videos that are equal parts vapid and uncanny. The latest raised eyebrows mostly because Melania Trump is defending herself against imaginary "media" attacks on her nude modeling. 

Trump, like her husband, is lying. There is no meaningful evidence that "the media has chosen to scrutinize" her alleged "celebration of the human form." These criticisms are as fictional as the cheering crowd Donald Trump swore he saw at the audience-free presidential debate. As puzzled late-night host Stephen Colbert said in response, "No one—absolutely no one—is asking about your nude modeling."

Nothing new about a Trump family member inventing phantom oppressors to claim victim status. But it's likely there's something else going on with whoever came up with this idea to have Melania Trump resist the invisible stones thrown by a fake media mob. In a word, it's bait. 

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The GOP has long been the party of prudes, captured by a Christian right that wishes to punish any sexual expression, especially by women, outside the bounds of procreative marital intercourse. Trump, with his playboy reputation, managed to trick a lot of voters into thinking Republicans were finally moving past the decades-long obsession with being the panty police.

In the past couple of years, however, Trump has lost some ability to leverage his promiscuous past to reassure Americans that he's not out to control their sex lives. The 2022 Dobbs decision that ended federal protection for abortion rights was his fault, as he stacked the Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices. The public has learned about Project 2025, and how it proposes a national abortion ban and restrictions on contraception. The addition of Sen. JD Vance to the ticket didn't help, as the Ohio Republican has a nasty habit of calling women who haven't had children yet "sociopathic" and "miserable cat ladies." Trump posting "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" reinforced how he's as misogynistic and joy-killing as the rest of his party. The alliance with the book-banning Moms for Liberty wasn't a great look, either. 

Donald Trump took another round of bad press when he refused to say whether he'd sign a national abortion ban in office during the presidential debate earlier this month. So it's likely not a coincidence that suddenly Melania Trump is reminding everyone she once did nude photoshoots. But in the crowded political news environment, even naked pictures aren't enough to get attention.

That's probably why Melania pretended to be crucified by the "media." This is ham-fisted trolling, an obvious attempt to get some impulsive liberal commentator, ideally a woman, to denounce her for the nude photos. Then the Trump campaign can pretend they're the great defenders of sexual freedom and it's those evil feminists that want to take your erotic rights away.  

The good news is that, so far at least, most folks have not given into temptation. There are a few engagement farmers on Twitter yelling about the sexual hypocrisy of the Trumps, but most political commentators and feminist activists have wisely decided to pass on condemning Melania Trump for long-past naked photos. Most folks on the left seem aware that accusing Melania Trump of hypocrisy will only be read as shaming her for the provocative photos. So they're walking right around that trap. It's a welcome sign that, after nine years of MAGA trolling, liberals have learned how not to fall for these manipulative tactics.

It's a big victory for the cause of willpower. Melania Trump's post was so weird and stupid, that it was hard for Trump critics to resist the bait. On Wednesday, I watched — with no small amount of amusement — Nicole Wallace, Molly Jong-Fast, and Maya Harris on MSNBC try to talk about the story without saying anything that could be misconstrued as sex-negative. Wallace joked that she'd never wear clothes if she looked like that and Wiley added, "Melania Trump should be able to be who she wants to be." There was some talk about the hypocrisy of this coming from the party that wants to ban books, but mostly the three women seemed not to care at all, and quickly moved onto another topic. 

This is not garden-variety hypocrisy, however. It's more sinister. And it's complicated in a way that defies cable news chatter. Melania Trump's defense of her nudes is part of the larger anti-equality, anti-democracy view of the Trump campaign. Yes, the Trumps are sending a "sexual freedom for me, but not for thee" message. But that's less hypocrisy and more part of their larger ideology that separates Americans into two classes: an elite that enjoys the privilege of erotic expression and the rest of us, for whom sex is a procreative duty and not a pleasure. 

In her video, Melania Trump compares herself to famous works of art, like Michaelango's "David." This is both hilariously weird and also a sign that this is more about an elitist worldview than plain old hypocrisy. Putting her nudie photos in the pantheon of great art isn't arguing for sexual freedom for all, but framing it as a privilege of the upper echelons of society who can be trusted to handle such provocations, unlike the grubby commoners. 

That Trump imagines himself royalty rather than a citizen of the U.S. is not exactly hidden, from his wealth-flaunting to his repeated insistence he enjoys "immunity" from prosecution. Bringing Vance onto the campaign was about putting an "intellectual" veneer on this authoritarian impulse. Vance is a devotee of Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, two pseudo-academics who use big words and high word counts to refashion their anti-democratic yearnings into a phony philosophy. As Marin Scotten wrote at Salon, Yarvin literally advocates for a dictatorship, arguing that "the current system of government should be replaced by one leader." It's a group of fascist geeks who think the common people aren't smart enough to be trusted with self-governance and need to be ruled over by an intellectually superior elite. The invalidity of this worldview should be evident in their backing of known "supergenius" Donald Trump. 

At first blush, this wouldn't seem to have much to do with Melania's sexy pictures, but it's all poisonous fruit from the same tree. If you believe the elite are smarter than normal people and the only ones who can be trusted with power, that logic will replicate in all areas of life. The elite are the only ones who can be allowed to read what they want, but common people will get censorship. The elite can make up lies, even ones that tear up working-class communities, as Vance and Trump are doing to Springfield, Ohio, and the little people should just take their abuse. And, of course, the elite are permitted to express their sexuality how they wish, while the common people's sexuality is controlled through abortion bans and other restrictions on our rights. This isn't experienced as hypocrisy but as the natural social order. 

Yes, even Donald Trump believes this. Normal people see him as a half-literate puddinghead, but he is always raving about how he's got a high IQ and was born a genius. He may not put the intellectual gloss on it that his running mate does, but he really does constantly talk about how he's inherently superior to the rest of us, with the implicit understanding this entitles him to power and privileges the rest of us should not have.