“If host and executive producer Donald Trump behaved toward female staffers of the Trump Organization the way he does on [The Apprentice], promoting women for sexy stunts and ignoring or rewarding the sort of treatment women have received from male Apprentice candidates over the years, he’d be setting himself up for sexual harassment lawsuits.”

flickr/TaraChill and Wikimedia Commons

By Jennifer L. Pozner

NBC giveth, and NBC taketh away.

We have the Peacock to thank for the ascension of a POTUS nominee whose campaign melds the sleaziness of Jersey Shore with the bigoted pandering of Duck Dynasty. For 11 years and 14 seasons, NBC’s The Apprentice groomed the nation to believe that a billion-dollar-losing, vendor-stiffing narcissist with multiple bankruptcies on his corporate record was the gold standard of American wealth, success, and business leadership. Worse, the series aggressively normalized statements and actions that meet the legal definition of gender and race-based workplace discrimination. As I wrote in my book, Reality Bites Back:

Now it seems NBCUniversal, specifically their fluffy infotainment show Access Hollywood, may be the Gaslighter-In-Chief’s undoing. Since the infamous 2005 hot mic video surfaced on Friday, capturing Handsy McGrabsalot boasting about getting away with sexual assault to giggling bro Billy Bush, GOP leaders have been scrambling to distance themselves from the top of their ticket, as if they hadn’t had evidence all year of exactly how misogynistic (and racist, xenophobic, and willing to incite violence) their nominee truly is.

Voters appear to be fleeing, with polls indicating major fallout from the tape, especially among women (prompting Trump trolls to create a #RepealThe19th hashtag campaign), although the biggest impact seems to be within the party. The day after we heard Trump brag that fame gives him a free pass to “just start kissing” women or to “grab them by the pussy,” Politico obtained an internal Republican National Committee email indicating that the RNC was at least temporarily ordering “a hold/stop on all mail projects right now. If something is in production or print it needs to stop” — a potentially devastating blow in light of the candidate’s weak get-out-the-vote ground game. By Monday, House Speaker Paul Ryan held a phone briefing to tell GOP pols that he would never again campaign for Trump, and that he will (and, he tacitly implied, they should) focus entirely on down-ballot races so that Clinton doesn’t have a Democratic Congress when she takes the Oval. Fifteen Republican senators and representatives (and counting) called for Trump to drop out of the race, and “at least 57 Republican national lawmakers and governors say they will not vote for Trump,” according to Slate.

Can anyone blame them? (Actually, Samantha Bee and John Oliver can, for good reason, and it’s deeply satisfying to watch them do so.) In most normal election cycles, any one of Trump’s unhinged “gaffes” — calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, telling African Americans their communities are festering hellholes, courting a bromance with Vladimir Putin, retweeting white supremacists, refusing to renounce the endorsement of a KKK leader, and so on — would have torpedoed his campaign.

Instead, despite these embarrassments being central to his presidential bid, they weren’t enough to keep the Republican leadership from endorsing him, nor could they prompt rank and file primary voters to select another nominee. Fissures began to form toward the end of the summer, though: Trump caused a growing backlash from a newly critical press by making assassination threats against his opponent, encouraging Russia to spy on the U.S. government, and attacking the Gold Star parents of a Muslim American soldier who died defending his country. Yet, still, the GOP stood by their man, continuing to endorse and campaign for Trump/Pence even while mouthing face-saving opposition to his comments. In this light, the Access Hollywood tape is almost a gift to Paul Ryan and other key GOP leaders who never liked Trump but were too mercenary and soulless to officially, substantively oppose him — until now.

Had the Access Hollywood footage been simply “lewd” — as grossly mischaracterized by headlines in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and other outlets — America would have listened to Trump and Bush sizing up Arianne Zucker’s legs and Nancy O’Dell’s “phony tits,” doused ourselves in a nation-sized vat of Purell, and moved on. After all, we’ve been well-acquainted with the candidate’s misogyny throughout the year, from menstrual hysteria about Megyn Kelly to inciting violent harassment of female journalists, from attacking a former Miss Universe winner on Twitter at 3am and encouraging us to check out her (non-existent) sex tape, to disgracing the presidential debate stage to bashing Rosie O’Donnell. None of that was enough to cost him party support or substantively derail his momentum.

So, why was Donnie & Billy’s Fun Time Gropemobile finally a bridge too far for the media, for voters, and for the GOP? Because the tape wasn’t simply offensive or vulgar — it showed a presidential candidate proudly relaying his strategy for engaging in criminal sexual acts against women. In doing so, it held up a disturbing mirror into the violence women endure every day in this country, and not only did we not like what it reflected, it made us feel profoundly unsafe (so much so that “America’s Therapists Are Worried About Trump’s Effect On Your Mental Health,” according to Politico).

Luckily, many media outlets contextualized this well, with unusually unambiguous reporting and analysis. The Atlantic properly named Trump’s comments as describing “illegal behavior,” “non-consensual kissing and grabbing of women’s genitals.” “Rape Culture Is Running For President,” The Stranger warned. The Daily News indicted, “How Donald Trump and Billy Bush abet assault.” We can expect feminist outlets like Bitch, Dame, and Vox to go hard on this story, but when even lad mad Esquire is running headlines like “As of Today, a Vote for Trump Is a Vote for Grabbing Women ‘By the P*ssy’” (subhead: “Vote your conscience”), we’re clearly at a turning point.

Shocker: Journalists At Work

All of which led to a something we haven’t seen in far too long: a journalist practicing actual journalism while moderating a presidential debate. Town halls have traditionally been among the most lightweight debates, yet the first question CNN’s Anderson Cooper posed on Sunday to the GOP’s nominee was as dark as they come: “You called what you said ‘locker room banter.’ You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Trump did not understand that. His response flipped through every page in his well-worn abuser’s handbook:

• First, he denied a thing the entire country watched him say on tape (“No, I didn’t say that at all.”)
• Then, he tried to make his inquisitor seem confused and wrong (“I don’t think you understood what was said.”)
• Next, he trivialized bragging about behavior meeting the legally definition of sexual assault as nothing worth getting upset over, just boys being boys (“This was locker room talk . . . it’s one of those things.”
• After a perfunctory fauxpology, he implied that concern over his sexual violence — which, to be clear, is concern for women’s safety — is a useless distraction from “more important and bigger things” (“ISIS chopping off heads . . . drowning people in steel cages!”)

To his credit, Cooper didn’t let him dodge the question. It is extremely telling that Trump couldn’t even bring himself to deny the rapey behavior he was clearly so proud of on the tape until Cooper asked him a fourth time if he had ever forced sexual acts onto women without their consent:

“Cooper: For the record, are you saying that what you said on the bus 11 years ago, that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?

Trump: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

Cooper: So for the record, you’re saying you never did that?

Trump: Frankly, you hear these things. They are said. And I was am embarrassed by it. But I have respect for women —

Cooper: Have you ever done those things?

Trump: — And they have respect for me. And I will tell you, no I have not. And I will tell you, that I’m going to make our country safe and we’re going to have borders which we don’t have now. People are pouring into our country and they’re coming in from the Middle East and other places. We’re gonna make America safe again, we’re gonna make America great again but we’re gonna make America safe again and we’re gonna make America wealthy again . . .”

This was a remarkable moment in journalistic history. As I tweeted Sunday night:

In 50 years, all we’ll remember about this #debate was a journalist asking POTUS nom if he committed sexual assault. Bravo, @andersoncooper.

???@jennpozner

(I suppose we’ll also be talking about the moment when one candidate promised to imprison his opponent like a two-bit dictator, but that’s another story.)

I wasn’t being facetious with that “bravo”; as a media critic, I couldn’t have been more grateful. The anchor’s willingness to hammer Trump on sexual assault was relevant and newsworthy, but unusual in contemporary presidential debates — as was moderator Martha Raddatz, ABC’s chief global affairs correspondent, pressing Trump for anything resembling accurate or rational comments on foreign policy in response to his incoherent rambling about Syria and Russia.

Cooper and Raddatz performed a real service, infusing journalism back into the dog and pony shows we’ve come to expect from these stages. Presidential debates increasingly resemble public relations exercises for politicians, rather than news-breaking opportunities for reporters to help Americans understand if candidates’ campaign rhetoric actually matches their legislative records, plans, and promises. As illustrated by the Commission on Presidential Debates recently coming out against real-time fact checking, the CPD is beholden not to American citizens but to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The result has been moderators lobbing mostly softballs, or sleeping through their task — as NBC’s Lester Holt seemed to do in the first Clinton/Trump debate — turning what should be illuminating, critical forums into glorified press conferences where candidates recite practiced soundbites and voters fail to learn anything new about their policy agendas or readiness to lead. (Or, in Trump’s case, given the freedom to creepily stalk his opponent across the stage and dry-hump a chair in front of the moderators, Ken Bone, and millions of horrified viewers.)

The impact of this should not be underestimated: approximately a third of undecided voters say the debates will be a major factor in the way they cast their ballots. In that light, relegating journalists to the role of glorified PR flacks shortchanges Americans and threatens the health of our democracy, keeping us less informed than we need to be to make credible decisions about whom we want to hold immense power over our collective futures.

The Least NBC Can Do

NBC has suspended Today Show anchor Billy Bush — likely indefinitely — for his role as Trump’s smirking, complicit hug pimp on that Access Hollywood bus. By benching Billy — the Bush cousin who makes Dubya look like a proud Mensa member — NBC sends the message that he bears responsibility for encouraging Trump’s sexual assault strategy, and for helping him degrade Arianne Zucker in their workplace in 2005. But when will the network reckon with their own responsibility in saddling America with the Trump reality star-who-would-be-POTUS juggernaut?

Here’s how they can start: They can release raw footage from The Apprentice’s 14 seasons, which reportedly captures Trump using the N-word, as well as sexually harassing female contestants and staffers on and off camera. At this stage in the election, those tapes are the political equivalent of forensic evidence, and the American people deserve access to them. Undecided voters, especially, have a right to view tapes that could help them evaluate if they want an N-word spouting sexual harasser in the White House. UltraViolet and MoveOn petitions have garnered more than 115,000 signatures pressuring NBC and MGM Studios (which owns the series) to release the tapes. Instead of doing the right thing, NBC claims it cannot release any footage and is referring calls to producer Mark Burnett who, stand-up guy that he is, is said to be threatening legal action against former staffers if they release the tapes, possibly with a “$5 million leak fee.”

Having documented nearly a decade of abject racism and misogyny in scenes that actually made it on-air on The Apprentice, I have no doubt that the years of material left on the cutting room floor may be at least, if not more, damning than those few minutes captured on the hot mic in 2005. As I wrote in Politico last year, after Trump claimed Fox News primary debate moderator Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her wherever”:

“Just like early adopters in technology shape user experiences well into the future, so did Donald Trump and his partner, Survivor producer Mark Burnett, help to create and solidify two of reality TV’s most bigoted tropes: that women in general are intellectually inferior to and less competent than men, and that African American women in particular are irrational, angry, lying bitches who can only get ahead by ‘playing the race card.’”

NBC and Mark Burnett are partially to blame for the rise of a candidate who poses such an unprecedented threat to our democracy that not one major newspaper has endorsed him — including Southern outlets that have previously only ever endorsed Republicans, and outlets that never endorse at all yet felt the urgent need to denounce Trump as resoundingly unfit for the office of the presidency. (To the best of my knowledge, this kind of consensus among news outlets has never happened in modern American history.) With less than a month until Election Day, the network and the producer owe those tapes to the American people.

After profiting from The Apprentice for 12 years, it is literally the least they can do.

***

On Wednesday evening, after I filed this story, the New York Times reported that two women have come forward to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting them in exactly the ways he bragged about the tape. One woman was a 22-year-old receptionist at a real estate company in Trump Tower when she says he kissed her on the mouth; this was 2005, the same year he told Billy Bush his game plan with “beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” The other incident took place several decades ago. Jessica Leeds was 38 when a flight attendant bumped her up to first class and she found herself seated next to Trump, who “raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her.” She told the Times that “Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt. ‘He was like an octopus,’ she said. ‘His hands were everywhere.’ She fled to the back of the plane. ‘It was an assault,’ she said.”

Additionally, People just published a first-person story by one of their own writers, describing Trump attacking her while she was at the Mar-a-Lago to report on his and pregnant Melania’s happy marriage, pinning her against a wall and forcing his tongue down her throat. With all three stories emerging less than a week since the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, I can’t help but wonder if we are at the beginning of a Cosby-esque avalanche.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/stop-telling-women-to-stay-hot-for-their-husbands-f093dc80cbcc/ Tue, 17 May 2016 22:18:12 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8052 Read more]]>

When dozens of women express some variation of “WTF did I just read?!” while sharing an article on social media, it’s a guarantee that some media outlet has successfully played us. I call such controversial pieces “Clickbait Crimes” — the result of media outlets intentionally publishing exploitative, bigoted, or sensationalistic content to generate outraged eyeballs for advertisers.

This week’s example, headlined “Staying Hot For My Husband Is ESSENTIAL To A Successful Marriage,” comes from Your Tango, a love and relationships site with a business model that often seems to involve trading tired, anti-feminist tropes for anger-based traffic. The thesis of the piece? Every successful heterosexual relationship is based primarily on a woman’s sex appeal, so you’d better not “let yourself go.” (No link to the piece because #starvethetrolls; like the class bully, Your Tango needs to be deprived of attention sought through bad acts.)

“When we were married a few weeks ago in front of our families, friends and a Rabbi, I vowed to stay hot for [sic] husband,” blogger Amanda Lauren writes, boasting about how happy her husband is to check out her butt on her way to Pilates, listing the fact that his friends “acknowledge he has a hot wife” as a mark of her marriage’s success, and classifying maintaining a hot bod and a makeup regimen to stun a Sephora salesperson as “doing the work I need to do for the sake of my relationship.” To lend legitimacy and universality to her argument — and to justify her glorification of classic societal beauty myths — Lauren quotes a “relationship and etiquette expert” who insists that “it’s incredibly important for women to maintain their looks” because “men are visual.” Based on platitudes from this lone “expert” (and failing to acknowledge that biological, behavioral, and social scientists disagree on how visually motivated men are individually, and as compared with women), she presents her quest for peak attractiveness not as a lifestyle choice but as a responsibility: “If men can’t help but be visual creatures, I need to oblige.” How so? By staying as sexy as possible forever and ever amen, because a lack of sex can break a marriage and “if my husband wasn’t turned on by me, we couldn’t have that essential intimacy.”

Because straight men are only turned on by their partners’ bodies, not their confidence, humor, intelligence, sensuality, or even their talented tongues? Because a straight, cisgender woman’s only route to sexiness is her ability to be male-gaze-approved? Because intimacy is only about boning? What a pity some of you poor saps think emotional, mental, and physical connection are more essential to a healthy and lasting sex life. As Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and meddling aunts everywhere have always informed us, men are only attracted to women who meet a very limited set of externally sanctioned standards: young, thin, big rack, small everything else, light skinned, straight-haired, hyper-feminine. The fewer of those criteria we meet, the less “hot,” the less valuable, the less lovable, we’re told we are.

If Lauren’s essay was framed as just one young woman’s preferences, I wouldn’t waste my time critiquing it. If the author loves to greet her husband with his favorite cocktail when he gets home from work (as she says she does), bully for her. Shaken or stirred? Dress up like Miss Moneypenny and deck your dude out in a James Bond tux if that’s what does it for you. I’m a media critic, not a therapist; I’m not in the business of publicly weighing in on anyone’s personal relationship or beauty preferences.

Here’s the problem: Your Tango packaged this piece (peppered with several “see? I really am hot!” glamour shots of the author) as an implicit and sometimes explicit guideline for how all wives should behave, what all women should be valued for, and the supposedly sad romantic prospects of women who don’t devote themselves to a lifelong quest to be as beautiful and alluring as humanly possible. “I’ve always wondered why many women let themselves go in relationships,” Lauren muses. “The decline of your physical appearance can also reflect your relationship . . . If you stop trying then you aren’t holding up your end of the relationship.”

Implicit in the article’s premise is not just “this works for me” but “BE like me.” Underneath Lauren’s breezy conversational tone is an unstated yet ominous threat: Do as much as you can, at all times, to be as traditionally “hot” as you can approximate . . . or else. Or else when your marriage fails (and it likely will, you poor, ugly, lazy sow), it will be your own fault. You don’t want your man to leave you, do you? So what are you waiting for, get thee to the treadmill and don’t you dare forget your sweat-proof mascara. Besides, Your Tango tells us, even Gloria Steinem, “of all women,” is “80 and in better shape than many women a quarter of her age.” If an outlet uses one of America’s most iconic advocates of women’s political, economic, social, reproductive, and sexual freedom to support its argument, it can’t be sexist, right?

Ever since the 1970s, corporate media have been hungry for culturally and politically retrograde arguments by women about gender issues, which they could package as “feminist” to kill two birds with one stone: continue advancing conservative anti-feminist ideology, but do so in a woman’s voice to mask the misogyny underlying this backlash to the perception that women are making political progress. I wrote about this extensively in my book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. Two decades prior, Susan Faludi documented this phenomenon in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. The ideas at the core of Lauren’s piece are the same as those of old-school etiquette guides that jockeyed for societal control of women, and of the beauty and fashion advertisements that have commercially exploited women’s psyches since the early 1900s.

Backlash media is deeply destructive. The clickbaity stories that Your Tango and other media outlets run about how it is a woman’s responsibility to “stay hot” for her husband not only play into knuckle-dragging MRA fantasies and echo Phyllis Schlafly-esque right wing women’s playbooks — they also acutely reinforce the fears of many girls and women who believe they are irrelevant and worthless based on deeply ingrained cultural conditioning around beauty ideals. Some women starve themselves trying to live up to ideas like this. Other women stay in abusive relationships because they have been made to believe they are not beautiful enough for anyone but their abuser to want them or love them. Pieces like this are none too good for straight, cisgender men either, essentializing them as unthinking oafs with no emotional range, no ability to think with anything other than their dicks, and no interest in true partnership. All of this is done for the profit of very canny media companies that know that producing substantive journalism (which takes time and resources) is less lucrative than publishing intentionally sensationalistic crap guaranteed to piss off online feminists.

Don’t worry, though, because this piece isn’t actually anti-feminist or old-fashioned. How do I know? The author made sure to tell us so. “Before you label me anti-feminist or old-fashioned, please understand that when I look good I feel more confident in myself,” which “allows me to be a better, happier and more considerate partner,” she writes. I’m sorry, but language doesn’t work that way. Words mean specific things. “Looking good” and “feeling confident” are not the definitions of feminist. When your proscriptive essay resembles a 1950s bridal manual or a 1930s Camay soap ad about “the beauty contest of life,” you can hardly blame anyone for considering your advice “old-fashioned.” Especially not when you open your piece by declaring you have “a more traditional marriage than most millennials . . . it’s kind of Mad Men, but it works for us.” (Quick, someone remind Your Tango that Mad Men spent seven densely-written seasons deconstructing the damaging sexism of traditional, mid-century marriages and the way strict gender roles held back both women and men in the private and public spheres.)

As Bitch magazine co-founder Andi Zeisler writes in her new book, We Were Feminists Once, just because a woman chooses to do something doesn’t make that act inherently feminist. Feminism is not simply about what an individual woman feels, it is a movement dedicated in part to eradicating gender-based double standards that constrain women’s and men’s lives — not reinforcing those biased strictures, as Your Tango too often does.

Let me be clear: I don’t assume negative intent on the part of Amanda Lauren, a newlywed who has not yet had to navigate the toll that age, motherhood, financial problems, and other stresses take on our appearances, and on the time we have to tend to them. It’s easy to see how a young writer, fairly early in her career, would think of an essay like this as an innocuous snapshot into her bridal philosophy with no wider relevance, especially if she has internalized societal messages about her own worth from a lifetime of movies, TV shows, music videos, magazines, commercials, billboards, and — yes — websites like Your Tango. I don’t think Lauren meant to cause women harm, although her article already did so on a macro (advancing reactionary ideas about gender roles in relationships) and micro level (several dozen women have written in social media discussions that they felt bad about their bodies or themselves after reading an essay reminding them that to the dominant culture, their looks make them unworthy of long-term love).

Your Tango, on the other hand, knew exactly what it was doing. In fact, it’s done this before — running the similar “I Think It’s Important To Stay Skinny For My Husband” in March. Yep, you read that right: Your Tango apparently has an actual beat related to making women readers feel disparaged and unworthy of love based on their looks. As I wrote in November about a particularly egregious Daily Caller listicle on “Syria-ly hot” refugees, media outlets regularly stoke the “Outrage Industrial Complex” by “troll[ing] feminists or progressives with intentionally odious headlines and bigoted content designed to generate angry clicks.” To wit, that “skinny for hubby” piece was not pitched by but assigned to the author, another young writer whose lifestyle and ideas were cynically used as grist for the site’s page views. Both Lauren and the author of this “Stay Skinny” piece are adults with agency to choose which articles to write and which ideas they want their bylines to extol. But the majority of accountability for these stories must come from the power-holder: the outlet that chooses to publish them, and the editorial process that recruited and highlighted these messages.

It’s no secret that women are published less often and make less money than male writers. Yet there’s always an outlet eager to throw a bit of cash at any woman willing to bang out some “[whatever outrageous thing I choose to do this week] works for me, so let’s make a huge logical leap and pretend this is true for and about the female half of the population” confessional essay. According to another freelancer who prefers not to out herself to a potential editor, Your Tango solicits articles from a large pool of bloggers by sending out emails chock full of potential headlines and topics. Some recent prompts have included, “I dumbed myself down to see if it attracts guys more,” “I abstained from having sex with my husband as punishment,” and “I’m only attracted to ugly women.”

I don’t expect a fluffy lifestyle and relationship site to read like Simone de Beauvoir or Kimberlé Crenshaw, but I’m going to need Your Tango to cut this crap out. Since that’s unlikely, here’s my counter-offer, direct to writers: If you don’t want to do harm, don’t write for Your Tango or sites that want to use you for clickbait. Just like friends don’t let friends drive drunk or date Trump supporters, I’m here to tell you that there have never been more outlets out there eager to publish engaging, insightful content about women’s lives. The Establishment, Bitch Media, Bust, Mic, Women’s Enews, Ms., Essence, Ebony, and even glossies like Elle and Cosmo now regularly run opinion pieces that respect women — and some of these sites pay more than Your Tango, too. You’re welcome.

***

Lead image: flickr/Jean L.

All presidential campaign years raise tensions, but Election 2016 has been especially divisive. The Republican and Democratic parties’ nominating battles have unfolded in such a painful and interminable way that I can almost imagine how exhausted my ancestors felt, wandering through the desert for 40 years. So destructive are the phenomena of this election that they bring to mind the 10 biblical plagues inflicted by the God of Israel unto Egypt.

Since Jews are currently celebrating the holiday of Passover, what better time to explore the plagues of the 2016 election?

1. Blood/Menstrual Hysteria

Just as the Passover Haggadah describes all the water in Egypt being turned to blood, all pundits could talk about after an August GOP debate was “Bloodgate.” It started when moderator Megyn Kelly asked GOP frontrunner Donald Trump if Americans should elect a president who “call(s) women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’” and who once insinuated that a female Apprentice contestant would look great giving him a blow job. As I wrote at the time in Politico, Trump went ballistic post-debate, calling in to CNN to whine that the reason Kelly attacked him with “ridiculous questions” was because “she had blood coming out of her wherever.”

The news “cycle” synced up like sorority members’ periods, proving true the old journalism adage, “If it bleeds it leads.” So much was made over The Donald’s menstrual swipe that a casual viewer could’ve been forgiven for confusing cable news shows with maxi pad commercials. Women live-tweeted their periods at Trump, and even right-wing operatives like RedState Gathering leader Erick Ericsson complained that Trump had crossed the line. Unfortunately, as I wrote at the time, far less attention was paid to Trump’s more egregious characterizations of Kelly as “a lightweight,” “highly overrated” journalist for whom he has “no respect,” or to his retweet of a supporter who called Kelly “a bimbo.” Trump’s PMS tantrum was far less newsworthy than his knee-jerk undercutting of women’s professionalism, intelligence, and competence — something that he has never confined only to Kelly, and which bodes ill for half the population if he were to be elected.

2. Frogs/Pandering

If we know anything about frogs, it’s that the slimy little bastards jump all over the place — an apt metaphor for the pandering ways of this year’s presidential contenders! Let’s start with the slimiest of them all. Donald Trump has leapt onto every pandering lily pad floating by: pretending he’d consider buying a farm in Iowa (picture it: gold-plated cows! with yooooge udders!), bungling the name of the biblical book Second Corinthians by calling it “Two Corinthians” at evangelical Christian Liberty University, and sounding like he wanted to reanimate a football coach’s corpse when he asked “How’s Joe Paterno . . . we’re gonna bring that back, right?” during a speech in Pittsburgh. (Yeah, he was referencing a statue of the dead Penn State figure that had been removed due to his involvement in the school’s child sexual abuse scandal, but still . . . yikes.) And don’t worry, we’ll get to his genuflecting to the white supremacist vote in the sixth plague.

Not even Trump’s “Two Corinthians” gaffe could hold a sabbath candle to John Kasich goysplaining Passover to Hassidic Torah scholars in Borough Park, Brooklyn, where he (oops!) awkwardly and erroneously linked the blood of the first plagues with Jesus. This inanity came right on the heels of Ted Cruz baking matzoh with Orthodox Jewish kids in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn — at the invitation of my mother’s right-wing rabbi. (I’ll let that sink in, and then I’ll accept your condolences. And your consolation gifts of dark chocolate or vouchers for therapy.) “He heard ‘cantor’ and thought they said ‘pander,’” Richard Mark Szpigiel said (on a puntastic Facebook thread where labor organizer Nick Alpers suggested the title of this article).

More disturbing was Hillary Clinton going full-hawk at AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, in a speech that could easily have been written by the Israeli government. Lest we think only Jews have borne the brunt of Panderdome, remember: member of the tribe Bernie Sanders finagled a meeting with Pope Francis to A) bask in the glory of the Vatican’s economic justice-focused pontiff, or B) court Catholic voters? Choose your own adventure.

I’m as knowledgeable about sports (go, sports!) as Garfunkel & Oates, but even I know that a basketball hoop is not called a “basketball ring,” which is more than we can say for Ted Cruz when attempting to win Indiana’s favor. Still, the Tea Party darling’s Hoosier-fail paled in comparison to Carly Fiorina pretending to root for Iowa to win the Rose Bowl against her alma mater, Stanford (“If you can’t stand up to the Hawkeyes how can you beat ISIS?” @pourmecoffee tweeted at Hewlett-Packard’s former CEO.)

Latinos on Twitter rejected the Democratic frontrunner’s Hispandering “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela” listicle (“she isn’t afraid to talk about the importance of el respeto!”) with the hashtag #NotMyAbuela (for example, @sabokitty’s “#NotMyAbuela because no one in my family ever overthrew (or tried to) democratically elected leaders in Honduras, Haiti, or Ecuador”). And though Hillary’s love of hot sauce is apparently long-term and sincere, the post-Formation “hot sauce in my bag, swag” timing of her comment that it’s the one thing she carries with her at all times — made during an interview with a NYC hip-hop morning show — was met with exactly as much side-eye as you’d expect. And I may have pulled a few muscles from cringing so hard watching her try to Whip and Nae Nae on Ellen, Snapchat that she was “Just chilling in Grand Rapids,” and co-opt Rosa Parks into her campaign logo.

But rarely is political calculus so visibly painful as when Chris Christie pretended to endorse Trump after eviscerating him on the regular. The memory of the New Jersey Governor silently screaming with his eyes behind The Donald’s shoulder, the victim of his own very personal plague, will linger for many Passovers to come.

3. Lice/Trolls

The disgusting, irritating bugs of this election cycles are, of course, the trolls that have skittered throughout every aspect of Election 2016’s primaries. From candidates themselves to the “guerrilla comedians” they can’t escape at campaign events, from late-night TV satire to garden-variety Internet jerks, sincere political discourse has been hard to find. When the Fourth Estate gets in on this game, though, they abdicate their responsibility to democracy. Trolling feminists and people of color has been part of corporate journalism’s business model for a good while now, with news outlets relying on online outrage to drive traffic. Yet there’s a special danger to our electoral process when news media simultaneously troll politicians and the voters who rely on their reporting to decide whom to trust as the leaders of our nation. Take as just one example a Washington Post story by Philip Bump headlined, “Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers contradict that.” What was that supposed contradiction? The “real” average donation is . . . drumroll, please . . . $27.89. Uh, what?

In a follow-up piece about the negative feedback his headline garnered, Bump admitted “It’s clear from the story itself that I don’t see this as any sort of lie on the part of the Sanders campaign,” then lamented that no one reads the story anymore. Excuse me? If you know more people will read the headline than the story, it’s even more important not to troll the electorate with a sensationalistic, misleading headline that would get any Journalism 101 student an F.

Doubling down on their “Why was everyone upset?” disingenuousness, WaPo actually laid out a modus operandi that more closely resembles GamerGate than principled journalism: “Part of the problem, though, is that the headline was viewed as suggesting dishonesty on the part of Sanders’s campaign. The working headline for the piece was ‘How does Bernie Sanders’s average donation stay at $27?’, but we (my editors and I) ended up choosing a headline that was more provocative. And provocative headlines provoke.” So, you chose an inaccurate headline in bad faith specifically to get people angry and up your clicks? Thanks for clearing that up for us, corporate media trolls.

4. Wild Animals/Bullying Dicks

What is more akin to the fourth plague’s wild animals than the schoolyard bullying BS of the GOP field? Marco Rubio mocked the size of Trump’s hands (“You know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them.”), which gave the overly tanned garbage fire an excuse to, well, I’ll let this CNN headline tell it: “Donald Trump Defends the Size of His Penis” during a live Republican debate on Fox News. Not surprising from a guy who feels the need to plaster his name in giant letters on every tall building he can. I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t call his Little Donald “the Trump Tower” from the debate stage.

Being a big dick is well-trod ground for Trump, who has repeatedly attacked his opponents’ wives. In July, he retweeted (and later deleted) a Twitter user who claimed “#JebBush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” Then there was the “whose wife is hotter/uglier?” grossness of his feud with Ted Cruz. First, a slut-shamey Cruz-supporting superPAC ad used an old cheesecake modeling photo of Melania Trump to urge Mormon voters to reject the reality star in the Utah primary. In response, Trump threatened Cruz that he would “spill the beans on your wife,” then retweeted a split-screen meme with an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz next to an airbrushed glamour shot of Melania, captioned, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Almost as classy as the Enquirer, which forced us to think about the possibility that not only is Ted Cruz anatomically correct (I find it’s easier to think of him as a Ken doll), but that five actual human women may have been his mistresses.

Oh, and let’s not forget Ben Carson’s near-sociopathic response to a mass shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. First, he blamed the victims of the rampage for not going all “Die Hard” on the shooter, fantasizing that he would have had the balls to lead a spontaneous attack and thwart the killer. His NRA-happy follow-up was ripped from the Dick Move Handbook: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away,” he declared.

5. Pestilence/Media ‘Gotcha’ Moments

Just as pestilence killed Pharaoh’s animals, corporate media’s love of meaningless, non-newsworthy, and completely irrelevant “gotcha” moments is killing my spirit as a media critic. Here’s just one case study of how these pests have operated throughout the primary:

First, the New York Daily News asked Bernie Sanders how to ride a NYC subway, as if this was crucial vetting of a presidential candidate. When the Vermont Senator and former Brooklynite replied “You get a token and you get in,” not knowing we use Metrocards now, the News (and the resulting news cycle) reacted as if he could see Russia from his house. Next, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton took the subway — and the bait — to display her “up with people” bona fides . . . only to be ludicrously gotcha’d by the right-wing America Rising PAC, which circulated a “shocking!” video of Clinton having to swipe her Metrtocard multiple times before the machine would register her fare, claiming this proves her to be “out of touch.” British conservative tabloid rag The Daily Mail gleefully reposted the video, along with a dozen photos of Clinton’s supposed subway fail, as if buggy Metrocard machines — especially in the outer boroughs, like the 161st Street Bronx station where Clinton entered, or the station closest to this lifelong Brooklynite’s apartment — don’t regularly require multiple swipes before properly reading a straphanger’s card.

Since these inane Swipe Right Wing stories were meant to catch both Democratic candidates being phony New Yorkers, let me say this the way we do in Brooklyn: whaddayafuckingkiddingme? How either of these politicians gets around town has exactly zero impact on how they’d govern as president. Many areas of inquiry from the political press corps could lead to legitimate “gotcha” moments, though. And since I’m feeling generous, election reporters, here — have a couple for free:

“Secretary Clinton, you were a partner in your husband’s administration, and stumped for legislation such as Welfare Reform, DOMA, Three Strikes, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and NAFTA, which were arguably devastating for women, people of color, low-income people, and the LGBTQ community. You also voted for the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war during your time in the Senate. How do you square that record with your current positioning as a so-called progressive feminist?”

“Senator Sanders, what are your specific plans for accomplishing your agenda as POTUS? The ‘incomplete answer’ buzzer will ring if you say ‘The people will stage a revolution,’ and you’ll have to try again.”

You’re welcome, press corps. Now go do your damn jobs.

6. Boils/Festering Bigotry

The boils of the sixth plague were “so painful and horrible that it must have struck the people of Egypt with horror and agony,” Chabad.org notes. And so it has been, ever since Donald Trump descended down that escalator to announce his presidential bid in June 2015. Far from the amusing distraction The Daily Show orgiastically predicted, “America’s ID” has picked at the scabs of America’s racist history, raising deep, open wounds that will take ages to heal.

It started with Mexican immigrants. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump insisted, and only a border wall (that Mexico will inexplicably pay for) will keep “us” safe from “them.” His supporters believed him enough to beat up a homeless Latino man with a metal pole, break his nose, and urinate on him because “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” Refusing to denounce the attack, here’s how the real estate magnate rationalized it: “The people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again.”

Then came his routine rants against anyone with Islamic faith, including his wholly inaccurate statement — debunked by law enforcement and the press alike — that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered when the World Trade Center fell on 9/11. He issued an immoral and highly impractical call for a wholesale ban on all Muslim immigration, and hardened his rhetoric even where Syrian refugee children were concerned, harming America’s reputation abroad (Hey, Don: When even Dick Cheney publicly states that your anti-terrorism proposal is too extremist and would come “at the expense of our American values,” it’s time to reevaluate your life). He suggested mandating a database or national ID card for Muslim Americans, prompting the Jewish organization Bend the Arc to circulate a petition that condemned “The idea that any group of American citizens should be singled out, profiled, and discriminated against,” while calling for American Jews to fight back when “a politician suggests following the actual path of the Nazis.” The petition’s headline? “Dear Trump: We’ve seen this before. It doesn’t end well.”

That’s for damn sure. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual census of hate groups and extremist organizations, “a presidential frontrunner given to racist and Muslim-hating oratory,” plus “a megaphone” for Islamophobia by “media outlets that encourage ‘debate’ about the basic humanity of Muslims,” helped fuel a rise in hate crimes against Muslims. Mosques have been “shot at, menaced with fake explosive devices, firebombed, threatened, and protested. One had a severed pig’s head tossed at it, and still another’s copy of the Koran was smeared with feces.” Innocent Muslim Americans have been targeted, injured, and even murdered:

• A Muslim cab driver in Pennsylvania was shot in the back by a passenger ranting about Islam.
• One Muslim woman was shot at as she left a Florida mosque, and a man threw rocks at another Muslim woman leaving another nearby mosque, then tried to run her off the road.
• A Muslim family’s home was shot up in Florida.
• An Uber passenger in North Carolina punched and threatened to shoot an Ethiopian Christian driver whom he assumed was Muslim.
• A New York convenience store owner was beaten up by a customer who said “I want to kill Muslims.”
• An Ohio driver yelling “terrorist!” tried to run over a pre-med student wearing hijab.
• And a sixth-grade girl in New York City was attacked, punched, and called “ISIS” by classmates who tried to rip off her hijab.

Like Pharaoh in the Passover story, Trump has remained unmoved, never strongly condemning this xenophobic violence against innocent Muslim Americans. Even more stark, he has inspired and actively egged on anti-Black and anti-Latino violence at his own campaign events, from his bigoted bluster to his verbal aggression and power-plays against people of color (including ejecting Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press conference). Attendees at his Alabama rally repeatedly screamed “White Power!” while Trump said nothing, continuing his speech as normal. A Black protester was forcibly removed from a campaign event in Las Vegas, while the crowd screamed “Shoot him!”, “Light the motherfucker on fire!”, and “Sieg heil!” It has become increasingly dangerous to be a protestor, especially one of color, at a Trump rally. Taking their cue from the candidate himself–who said of a Nevada protestor “I’d like to punch him in the face,” and who has repeatedly yelled at and tacitly encouraged his crowd to harass Black Lives Matter protestors–Trump fans, security guards, and even his campaign manager have threatened, harassed, pushed, grabbed, hit, punched, kicked, choked, and slammed protestors and even journalists to the ground, usually while screaming racial and misogynist slurs, as documented by Mother Jones, MTV, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets.

No wonder he has been endorsed by white nationalist leaders such as Jared Taylor and famous former Klansman David Duke. When pushed by CNN’s Jake Tapper to comment, Trump refused to reject the support of notoriously violent white supremacists and the KKK, disingenuously pretending not to know who Duke is and, in a dog whistle to his base of angry, racist voters, said he would need to “do research” before he could say “if I thought there was something wrong” (emphasis mine). He didn’t need any research to retweet white supremacist lies, though: “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters” by RT’ing several tweets about “white genocide,” hate site The Daily Stormer bragged. According to “The Year in Hate and Extremism” report by the SPLC, “White supremacist forums are awash with electoral joy, having dubbed Trump their ‘Glorious Leader.’ And Trump has repaid the compliments, retweeting hate posts and spreading their false statistics on black-on-white crime.” In part as a result, the number of hate groups rose by 14% last year, and the KKK has seen membership spike as well. In “White Supremacist Groups See Trump Bump,” Politico notes that “The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike.” Trump “has sparked an insurgency and I don’t think it’s going to go away,” praised Stormfront founder Don Black, who “reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career. (For more on Trump as the white nationalist recruiter-in-chief, see Democracy Now!, Counterpunch, and the New York Times.)

Of course, Trump’s anti-Black, Islamophobic, white nationalist-provoking rhetoric is simply the full album release of the demo tape he issued back in the day as Birther-In-Chief. The open sores of his attacks on President Obama’s citizenship have metastasized into the deeper, more broad-scale socio-political disease that is his current popularity.

7. Hail/Meteoric Misogyny

“No living thing . . . was to escape its fury unhurt,” or so goes the tale of hail, the seventh plague. Likewise, American women running for president on both sides of the aisle — along with voters who dare to express a preference for them — have been battered by a non-stop barrage of open misogyny from candidates, surrogates, supporters, and the press. This goes far further than those much-discussed Bernie Bros (for those stingers, jump down to the eighth plague).

“And it came to pass, barely seconds after he became the near-inevitable Republican presidential nominee, that Donald Trump began a gender war,” Gail Collins writes in today’s New York Times. “‘Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card,’ Trump said in the aftermath of his five-state primary sweep on Tuesday.” Collins is right to call out Trump for using calculated sexism as he looks toward the general election, and as a journalist no one loves a catchy lede more than I do. But here’s the problem with “began”: Trump’s been fomenting his gender war front the start. He has accused Clinton of “playing the woman’s card” since early in his campaign to both trivialize her stances for a range of women’s rights policy issues and to dismiss her criticisms of his gross displays of sexism.

And it hasn’t been just Hillary freezing in Trump’s hail of gendered attacks. Back in September, Rolling Stone described how his “expression sours in schoolboy disgust” while watching a news clip of Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face!” he cries. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?! . . . I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” Faced with pushback when the quote circulated, he pretended he wasn’t trashing Fiorina’s appearance, expecting the media and the public to buy that when he said “that face,” he meant her “persona.” (Pro tip: you should believe that “persona” gambit just as much as you should believe The Apprentice actually had good ratings after the first couple of seasons. Which is to say: not at all.)

There have been many operatives in Election 2016’s hailstorm of misogyny. As Veronica Arreola wrote in January, “heterosexist media is so puzzled by Lindsey Graham’s status as a single dude and by having women in the race that Dana Bash of CNN actually asked Graham “to choose which woman he would date, marry, or make vanish among Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, and Sarah Palin.” (The CNN video is here, if you want to vomit your matzoh.) And Mike Huckabee “made people laugh when he said that he was quite familiar with Janet Yellen because his wife’s name is Janet. Get it? Janet . . . yelling? That bit of marital sexism was almost as cute as the time he said he would put his wife’s face on the new $10 bill so she could finally spend her own money. Get this guy on a 1970s Dean Martin roast!,” Arreola #lolsobbed. Even the women of “The View” got in on this action, calling Fiorina’s face “a Halloween mask.”

And in echoes of the 2008 election fight, Hillary Clinton’s voice has been repeatedly criticized, with the former Secretary of State branded shrill, shouting, nagging, angry, and many other gendered terms never applied to her loudly vitriolic male competitors. Headlines, TV news segments, tabloids, and social media users alike have ragged on her hair, her height, and her weight. After she won several primaries, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough condescendingly told her to “Smile. You just had a big night.” (Samantha Bee was not impressed, encouraging women to post their displeasure in pics tagged #SmileForJoe.)

Writers including Brittney Cooper, Lauren Besser, and Melanye Price have argued compellingly that the press and the public alike have held Clinton to double standards not faced by her male counterparts, not only in terms of voice and appearance but also her policy positions and record as a public servant: for example, she has been (100% rightly) criticized for her comments in the 1990s about “super-predators” and her support for her husband’s crime bill that led to vast over-incarceration of African Americans, yet Bernie Sanders has mostly avoided critique despite the fact that he voted for the same bill in the Senate.

Where some of these double standards can be difficult to discern without media literacy and political education, electoral misogyny has rarely been more in-your-face than Tea Party cartoonist Ben Garrison’s drawing of an exaggeratedly grotesque-looking “Hill-whore-y Clinton” clad in red panties, black fishnets, and a belly shirt riding up above a roll of fat, leaning over a faceless finance exec’s car as he hands her a wad of cash, while Bernie Sanders (depicted as more polished and chiseled-featured than he has been in decades) looks on in disdain. Garrison’s hashtags? “#WallStreetWalker” and “#DemocratWhore.” More than just a cynical attempt by a right-wing operative to pit Clinton’s and Sanders’ supporters against one another, this kind of imagery threatens not only women’s ability to seek, win, and be effective in office — it also threatens democracy, as I have written many times, discussed in media literacy speeches, and explained in the documentary “Miss Representation.” (While I don’t want to link directly and drive traffic to Garrison, you can see the cartoon here, along with my dissection of why, despite legitimate reasons to critique Hillary Clinton, imagery like his is illegitimate, a way to trivialize, essentialize, and attack all women, and the idea of women’s leadership at large.)

8. Locusts/Bernie Bros

Just as locusts besieged Egypt in the eighth plague, swarms of Bernie Bros (brogressives?) incessantly sting anyone who dares to say anything remotely not-awful about Hillary Clinton. Uttering “Bernie Sanders” throughout the primary has had the effect of the Batman signal in reverse, causing a loud, damaging minority of Sanders surrogates to fly in with condescension, verbal abuse, and even rape and death threats. True Believers in the moral superiority of their candidate, this subset of Sanders supporters sees no irony in undermining the Vermont Senator’s high ground — not to mention his solid record on women’s rights — by spewing vile, explicitly gendered invective about Clinton, while actively harassing her supporters. While #notallBernievoters are Bernie Bros — and many women who call out Bernie Bros’ sexism are Sanders supporters themselves — writers like Sady Doyle have documented and analyzed the depth and prevalence of Bernie Bros’ violent and sexist abuse.

Still, some petulant so-called progressives refuse to believe women, and others would throw all women and people of color under the bus out of spite. Liberal male journalists like Glenn Greenwald insist Bernie Bros don’t exist, that the term was “concocted” by “pro-Clinton journalists” as a “scam” to poison anyone against feeling the Bern. Sanders, whose economic justice policy positions have been consistent for decades, would never encourage anyone to vote for a bigoted billionaire real estate mogul over Clinton — but that hasn’t stopped Bernie Bros from declaring that if their guy loses, they’ll support Donald Trump in the general election before they’d ever vote for that (bitchcuntwhoreshrew!!!) Hillary. So, for Greenwald and all his compatriots who argue that the Bernie Bro phenomenon is a fabrication, I offer as tribute not the worst example, just the most recent: a public Facebook thread posted by an Occupy Wall Street organizer the same morning I wrote this piece. Responding to a Clinton statement during an MSNBC town hall, he ranted:

In the conversation that followed, he went further: “If Hillary is the nominee, I just may actually go ahead vote for Trump, just to be a snivelling (sic) vengeful little shit.” His fellow bros agreed:

Also important to note: men aren’t the only ones using Bernie Bro tactics: This fine gem of a comment on the OWS poster’s thread came from a woman:

Tell me again how these political locusts don’t exist?

9. Darkness/Voter Disenfranchisement

According to the Passover story, “a thick and impenetrable veil of darkness” enveloped Egypt in the ninth plague. Voters who have stood in ludicrously long lines, waiting late into the night to cast their ballots, could probably relate. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, for example, there were 400 polling places in 2008 and 200 in 2012, but the county’s 4 million residents were confined to only 60 polling places during this primary. The last Arizonan to cast a ballot was only able to do so after midnight; Mother Jones offers a useful primer on the way this cycle fits into Arizona’s history of voter disenfranchisement. My home state of New York was wracked by its own widespread charges of voter suppression. After 125,000 Democratic voters found themselves purged from the rolls in error or for no reason at all, an organization called Election Justice USA filed a lawsuit against New York’s Board of Elections, calling for provisional ballots from disenfranchised voters to be counted.

Similar problems cast a dark pall over the levers of democracy in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, and throughout the country, as various states have cut early voting hours, eliminated same-day registration, mandated proof of citizenship for regional voting (which federal elections do not require), and passed voter ID laws that disproportionately impact and restrict the voting rights of poor people and people of color.

10. Death Of The Firstborn/Death Of The Dynasty

The last, grimmest plague finally broke Pharaoh, who released the Jews from slavery after the Angel of Death killed every firstborn child in Egypt. Like Pharoah’s son, the Bush dynasty died a dramatic death in February when assumed-nominee Jeb! suspended his spectacularly incompetent campaign on the heels of embarrassing losses in New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina. No political career suffered a more devastating blow this cycle than Jeb’s. The GOP’s heir apparent, this son of a former president and the brother of another, raised — and wasted — more money than any other candidate ever, flushing a record $150 million down the drain along with the former Florida governor’s political ambitions. Buh-bye.

Unlike the ending of the Passover tale, Election 2016 has no redemptive resolution, no liberation from bondage. If the GOP is Egypt in this metaphor, then a roadkill-coiffed, race-baiting, misogynist Angel of Death has run roughshod over the Republican establishment (which, please note, is not this magazine!), leaving only chaos in his wake. Donald Trump is basically running to be America’s gold-encrusted Pharaoh.

Unless Elijah shows up on the final seder night, we’re all going to need a LOT of Manischewitz to get through November.

***

Illustrations by Katie Tandy