Melania has been sticking with her #BeBest thing about cyberbullying.  I’m trying to understand what’s going through her mind on this as it’s not at all in line with what her husband is up to.

Now the GOP has had a long and illustrious history of naming things the opposite of what they really are:

  • Citizens United. It sounds like it’s something for the citizens but it’s really for big corporations.  I guess this is understandable because you can’t have a resolution called Corporations Require Agreeable Politicians (CRAP).
  • Right to Work.  It would appear to champion worker rights but it’s really about letting corporations ask folks to work for a pittance with none of that messy union interference.  Again, I guess they needed a different name than Now Exploiting Workers (NEW).
  • American Health Care Act. Sounds like it’s something to advance health care but it’s really taking health care away from tons of people, and as such could have been called Legal Insurance Awful Really (LIAR).

So this in mind, maybe Melania is calling it #BeBest but really wants kids to step up their online bullying game.  That could be it.  But let’s explore and try to divine what she might be thinking.

Five Possible Explanations

  1. She’s unaware.  This seems unlikely given she has to see news about her hubby and there is evidence that she is exposed to something besides Fox News which covers the #BeBest initiative while quietly not mentioning anything about DT bullying and insulting folks on social media.  But she was ostensibly watching CNN so she must have heard that her hubby is kinda Cyberbully #1.
  2. She’s trolling DT. Maybe the marriage is so far on the rocks that this is her way of communicating with DT.  Maybe granting her parents citizenship (“chain migration”as some are wont to call it) was conditional upon her agreeing to stay married. So she’s just mouthing off a little bit but not in a way that violates whatever legal thing DT has with her.  Side note: I’m tearing up a bit thinking of the tender affection implied by this legal agreement.
  3. She considers DT’s cyberbullying somehow different.  Maybe she thinks he’s “fighting fire with fire” by responding to folks who’ve wronged the Donald.  Although it’s a little hard to imagine how the beauty contestant or the family of the fallen soldier or the hundreds of other folks he’s insulted could really be harming DT in a way that requires fighting fire with fire.  There’s something in the Bible about that, right?  Oh no, I think that was something about cheeks.
  4. Along the same lines as #3 she considers Twitter to not be “social media.”  Maybe “Facebook” and “Instagram” are social media but Twitter is something else. Granted the posts on Facebook and Instagram can be kinda long winded and the bite-sized read-on-the-can Twitter missives are more suited to the modern attention span (or lack thereof).  So maybe Twitter is different.
  5. As alluded to above, it’s an opposite-land thing and she really wants kids to be better, tougher cyberbullies.  Maybe it’s more of the GOP philosophy of just saying stuff so you can claim you spoke out while really meaning none of it and in fact probably voting the exact opposite.  This is a cornerstone of the GOP playbook and  apparently there are plenty of folks who are still confounded by this simple ploy.

In any case, the picture for this article shows how things would have looked during Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign “every litter bit hurts” had her husband been DT instead of LBJ.