Melania Trump's Double-Double Standards...It's Like 16 Walls!

"It's like...sixteen walls!" - imgs: DeviantArt; Independent

Language is very important. When a political figure is elected by the public, it's not just their policies which are given a mandate: it's their overall style of politics. The foundational rhetoric of their campaign, the language upon which their canvassing has been built, is given the O.K. by the surveying public. Melania Trump's aware of this. She also knows that, on Wednesday 9th, we might wake up to the results of the US Presidential Election and realise that, in our Hobbit holes, tucked in among Britain's rolling hills, within our public sphere and our social media, we have sunk deeper into the waters of an unsettling idea: "well, if the leader of the Free World can talk like that, so can I." Indeed, just imagine how worried she must be about the domestic reaction to such an event. But not to fear: Mrs Trump has a plan. Melania's been spending the past few days reassuring everybody, Stateside and everywhere, that, as First Lady of the United States, she will personally spearhead a campaign to combat cyber bullying and abuse online.

Wow. That's not just double standards, that's like... double-double standards. That's four standards at least. Ryan Reynolds would be proud.

Ever since the 2008 election, wherein John McCain was hopelessly out-paced by Obama's online rallying of prospective voters, social media has been the front line for Presidential candidates. It's just as important as TV today - heck, it might already be TV. It's certainly theatre; and it's a key battleground in The TrumpBleak Roadshow. But if we consider the footprint Donald Trump has left on Twitter up to this point (a platform he uses to say things like "the United Kingdom is trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem") it's common knowledge that he's set back efforts to delegitimise general harassment by at least a century. There's no need to go back through the list of minority (and sometimes majority) communities he's excluded from the blueprints of his Great American Nation; and it doesn't take much to see right through Melania's promise that a Trump administration would be of net benefit to American social cohesion. It's obvious enough. But let's at least write down what we're too exhausted to keep yelling at the computer screen.

If anything is likely to mandate a hostile Twittersphere, or indeed a hostile anything, it's a vote for Donald Trump. Even if Melania were likely to follow-though with anything she's promising (which she clearly won't be doing), it's nevertheless the case that, for those who want to see a cleaner media, social or otherwise, the most effective possible move, by a very wide margin, is to vote for somebody else - someone who espouses the kind of language that promotes cohesion outside the internet realm, between different genders, ethnicities, religions, and nations. Even if they don't act on their words, members of the public will. Language is very important. Leading by example within certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour, changing the way people think offline, can change the way they talk online. A cynical promise of a phony initiative, made at the last minute by a person who clearly holds the intelligence of the electorate in contempt, just won't.

James Stannard

James has a Bachelor’s degree in History and wrote his dissertation on beef and protest. His heroes list ranges from Adele to Noam Chomsky: inspirations he’ll be invoking next year when he begins a Master’s degree in London. Follow him @Songbird_James

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