As part of the Trump family's larger efforts to snatch every MAGA dupe's nickel in the last days of the campaign season, Melania Trump — well, someone purporting to be Melania Trump, anyway — wrote a book. While her husband, Donald Trump, travels around the country with white nationalist Laura Loomer by his handsy side, Melania Trump has been releasing book promotion videos that are equal parts vapid and uncanny. The latest raised eyebrows mostly because Melania Trump is defending herself against imaginary "media" attacks on her nude modeling.

Trump, like her husband, is lying. There is no meaningful evidence that "the media has chosen to scrutinize" her alleged "celebration of the human form." These criticisms are as fictional as the cheering crowd Donald Trump swore he saw at the audience-free presidential debate. As puzzled late-night host Stephen Colbert said in response, "No one—absolutely no one—is asking about your nude modeling."

Nothing new about a Trump family member inventing phantom oppressors to claim victim status. But it's likely there's something else going on with whoever came up with this idea to have Melania Trump resist the invisible stones thrown by a fake media mob. In a word, it's bait.

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The GOP has long been the party of prudes, captured by a Christian right that wishes to punish any sexual expression, especially by women, outside the bounds of procreative marital intercourse. Trump, with his playboy reputation, managed to trick a lot of voters into thinking Republicans were finally moving past the decades-long obsession with being the panty police.

In the past couple of years, however, Trump has lost some ability to leverage his promiscuous past to reassure Americans that he's not out to control their sex lives. The 2022 Dobbs decision that ended federal protection for abortion........

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