When euphemisms won’t do
The Hill reports that Ivanka Trump is going to have an office in the White House that’s usually kept for “the First Lady.” Julia Ioffe, a political journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and until yesterday wrote for Politico, tweeted about the hint of skeeviness in the story:
Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?
Crude, but then it’s impossible to write honestly about Trump without crudity. Trump himself oozes crude from every pore, and that means that putting his words and actions into more genteel language is likely to misrepresent them. He is crude, he is a pig, he does see the world in such contemptuous and libidinous terms. He did, after all, agree with Howard Stern that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” on live radio. So yeah, we’re not going out of our way to be crude if we say maybe he’s fucking her, because maybe he is, and if he is that’s how he would put it.
Remember the Access Hollywood tape? It started with his failed attempt to fuck – his word – a married woman.
Donald J. Trump: You know and …
Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful.
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.
Unknown: Whoa.
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.
Unknown: That’s huge news.
That’s Trump. That’s who he is. He doesn’t have sex with women, he fucks them.
In my view, that’s why Ioffe worded her tweet that way – because it’s Trump she was talking about.
But Politico doesn’t see it that way.
The respected political journalist Julia Ioffe’s tenure at Politico has come to an endafter she posted an unfortunate — and straight-up vulgar — tweet about Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka. Ioffe was already wrapping up her time as a contributor to Politico and moving to a new job at The Atlantic when she posted the ill-advised tweet, but now Politico is accelerating the process, bringing her contract to a premature close.
…
The political news organization promptly ended Ioffe’s contract, sending a textbook strongly worded letter — which of course leaked — from editor-in-chief John Harris and editor Carrie Budoff Brown to its employees:
“Gratuitous opinion has no place, anywhere, at any time – not on your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed or anyplace else. It has absolutely zero value for our readers and should have zero place in our work” – but it wasn’t gratuitous. It was pointed, and it had the kind of value that pointed opinion can have.
I think Politico is dead wrong about this, especially since she said it on Twitter, not in a piece for them that somehow no editor saw before publication.
Ioffe has long been a favorite target of the less-reputable segments of Trump supporters — if you have a high tolerance for poorly Photoshopped, stomach-churning anti-Semitic memes, just give her name a Google image search.
Since Ioffe was already on her way out at Politico the censure doesn’t really count as a firing, per se.
But it’s a censure, and a mistaken one.
This pretense of “independent reporting and analysis” just infuriates me. It leads to the idea that “both sides have value” and “there are two (equal) sides to every story”. NO. That is simply not true.
Whether he’s (still?) fucking her or not, Trump certainly displays an unnatural obsession for Ivanka, first displayed (as far as I can tell) in that flesh-creepingly sinister photograph of them as the teenage child cups his chin and gazes at his face (not into his eyes, he’s leering staight at the camera), and with his left hand placed uncomfortably close to her pubic region.
The more I see that picture the worse it looks. There has always been something about it, apart from the obvious, that has bothered me that I could never quite put my finger on, but the penny has finally dropped – it’s Ivanka’s face.
As a former emergency foster carer I have worked closely with Social Services and other child protection agencies, but what I am about to say applies equally to adults in abusive relationships.
The abused are taught to fear their abuser, and part of that is to not show open contempt or hatred in public or else! When put in the position of having to be in public with their abuser the abused will try to pretend that all is well, but very few people possess the acting skills to carry this off perfectly, and photographs are often the best place to spot certain tells.
The abuser will be perfectly happyand natural in a posed picture with their victim, but the abused will not; their stance will often look rigid with the body held slightly away from the abuser, the smile -if there is one – will often look forced, and so-on.
In that famous photograph I look again at Ivanka and she looks uncomfortable; there’s no smile on her face, she looks frightened, ‘haunted’ almost. She certainly doesn’t look like a daughter happy to be posing with her daddy.
I’ve got a thousand photographs of me with my daughters – admittedly non posed like that one! – and I can guarantee that in none of those snaps are my children looking at me like Ivanka is looking at Donald.
I have, however, seen a lot of pictures of abused with abuser, whether the abuse is sexual, physical or otherwise, and whether the abuse is parent-child or partner-partner, and I have seen Ivanka’s face in so many of those pictures.
So, what is my point here? I’m not entirely sure. Was Donald abusing the young Ivanka? Maybe she has evidence and is using that to get whatever she wants from him, or he is keeping her close to him to keep an eye on her and keep her from spilling the beans. Hell, maybe she even managed to ‘normalise’ the abuse as so many victims do, and now a relieved daddy is throwing privileges at her.
Or maybe I’m just letting the horrors from my past cloud my judgement of the present.
@ 1 James Garnett
On the other, if you don’t care about “independent reporting and analysis” you get Fox News.
Somehow the idea that you are not allowed to have an opinion on your own facebook feed…that’s…
That’s one reason I won’t consider facebook. Teachers often come in for the same attitude. Say the wrong thing, and whammo, you’re out.
@ 2 Acolyte of Sagan
Not to mention, in that picture, the sculpture they’re sitting on is a big male bird humping a little female bird. Not to mention this. We’re not the first to notice that relationship has a very creepy vibe.
Silentbob @3:
No. I never said that I “don’t care” about so-called independent reporting and analysis. There is reporting that comes close to nonpartisan/independent reporting, such as the AP, but they studiously avoid any kind of analysis. I can appreciate the reporting side of the AP, in that they try to report only facts and in such a way that even the dreaded Fox News can use their coverage.
But ultimately, there is no such thing as “independent analysis”. There is bias in every reporter and analyst, and bias is not necessarily wrong unless it is used as propaganda. Trying to pretend that every side of a debate has equal merit just results in crappy analysis; NPR is particularly bad in this respect. It was precisely the absurd desire to compare/contrast “all sides” that resulted in analysts essentially abrogating their responsibility to critically examine Trump during the election.
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