Journalists don’t quite grasp the concept of “bullying,” otherwise they’d stop trying to find a link between first lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign and her husband’s tweets.
There is no link because there is no world in which President Trump can seriously be described as a “bully,” though the media have tried for the past three years to make it stick.
Melania Trump on Monday spoke out against cyberbullying at a summit just outside of Washington and almost every clever reporter saw it as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their heightened sense of irony.
“I can’t decide if Melania’s cyber-bullying campaign is just a massive troll on her husband or if she is truly unaware of all of the context here,” tweeted CNN’s geeky Chris Cillizza.
Because everyone on CNN is apparently required to think and say the exact same thing, Cillizza’s colleague John Avlon said the next morning, “In choosing this particular initiative, out of all the ones that she could have done, you got to ask yourself whether she’s trolling the president on this issue.”
Associated Press reporter Darlene Superville’s write-up of the event helpfully noted that, “Neither she nor any of those who spoke during morning sessions mentioned President Donald Trump and his aggressive use of Twitter to berate his foes and call them names.”
Journalists, who stand at the ready to call you a racist if you sneeze in the presence of a black person, love calling Trump a bully because he tweets funny nicknames or calls the media fake.
The New York Times in August called Trump a “notorious Twitter bully.”
The Department of Health and Human Services says that “in order to be considered bullying, the behavior must be aggressive and include an imbalance of power.”
It’s one man, Trump, against the entire national media, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party (at least until he successfully recreated it in his own image).
But Trump’s the oppressor?
When Melania Trump hosts one of her anti-bullying events, she probably has in mind children like 13-year-old Missouri girl Rylie Wagner, who was relentlessly taunted by her schoolmates over her looks and her clothes.
“I know there were girls telling her to go kill herself just about every single day,” Wagner’s mother Renee told a local NBC affiliate in May last year.
Rylie did kill herself.
I suspect that’s what the first lady’s “Be Best” campaign is about. And not so much a slick dig at Trump because he called someone dumb on Twitter.
