Elizabeth Warren has a weird way of supporting her friends.
After Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., called for President Trump’s resignation on Monday, the president claimed on Twitter the New York senator “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago” adding in parentheses that she “would do anything for them.” Trump’s tweet, posted on Tuesday morning, was widely interpreted as an accusation that Gillibrand was willing to trade sexual favors for campaign donations.
Sen. Warren, D-Mass., quickly jumped into the fight, replying to the president with a tweet of her own. “Are you really trying to bully, intimidate and slut-shame [Sen. Gillibrand]? Do you know who you’re picking a fight with? Good luck with that, [Donald Trump],” the senator wrote, adding, “Nevertheless, #shepersisted.”
Warren’s ability to inject both “slut-shaming” and her personal branding into a statement of support for a beleaguered presidential rival is almost impressive for its transparent opportunism.
Believe it or not, the Oxford English Dictionary actually has a definition for “slut-shaming,” which it says is to “[s]tigmatize (a woman) for engaging in behavior judged to be promiscuous or sexually provocative.” That’s a fairly accurate encapsulation of how the term is used colloquially. But Warren’s deployment of the term is puzzling. For Trump to “slut-shame” Gillibrand, the New York Democrat would have had to have actually engaged in some sort of behavior “judged to be promiscuous or sexually provocative.” Either Warren didn’t pause to consider the implication of her tweet, or she just leveled quite the underhanded compliment.
Both senators could plausibly end up battling one another for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020, something that could at least explain why Warren couldn’t resist calling attention to her own bravery by adding the #shepersisted hashtag to a supposed defense of Gillibrand.
Much like the president, Warren might want to rethink her tweet.
