Donald Trump Jr. recently posted a doctored image of his dad throwing a sex toy from atop the White House down to a likeness of a WNBA court on the front lawn. Apparently, he didn’t want his dad to miss out on participating in the string of misogynistic attacks against our top female athletes.
But what do I know? One of the perks about living in this country in the digital age is that resources are readily available. I’ll ask Chapt GPT. They just came out with a new version–GPT5–which I am trying out for the first time, and I must say, wow. I’ve heard others gripe, but as someone who rarely uses these tools, I’m pretty impressed. I put in my query and got an instant response complete with links and photographs. Neat.
And for readers questioning the ethics of this practice, I am taking my cues from Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, a book that was in part co-written by AI. It’s a good read.
So, here I go, Chat GPT: “Why did Trump Jr. post a doctored image of his dad throwing a sex toy?”
“Here’s what’s going on, and why he may have shared that meme. Donald Trump Jr. recently posted a digitally altered, AI-generated image showing his father, Donald Trump, standing on the White House roof and tossing a bright green sex toy toward a WNBA court where players are below. The caption read, ‘Posted without further comment,’ accompanied by laughing emojis.”
I guess I didn’t give enough context in my prompt, but for others who could use that information, there you go.
But first I will interject with a pronounced slamming of my fist. There is nothing funny about hurling objects at athletes and trying to interfere with their sporting event. These incidents are linked to a memecoin called the Green Dildo Coin. Until researching this, I didn’t even know what a memecoin was, but according to one source that ChatGPT linked to, The San Francisco Chronicle, “Memecoins are joke-based cryptocurrencies that often gain value through viral internet attention rather than any underlying utility.”
The group behind the coin deliberately targeted the WNBA to, in the words of one anonymous member in an ESPN interview, “really make memes funny again.”
Yeah, he said that.
First of all, if people were throwing anything down to an NBA court it would not be tolerated. No one would think it’s “funny.” And the practice would be seen as so far outside the norm that the son of our president would not exercise his creative powers to give the world another meme that at its core insults women. These are athletes we’re talking about. Not sex workers. No offense to sex workers, who are probably also fuming over this latest trend. But back to the WHY of it all.
According to Chat GPT, Junior might have done it “to mock the absurdity of the situation.” Or to “lean into his M.O. of sharing offbeat memes about his dad.” Or to “spark reactions.”
These “reasons” may sound like harmless trolling to some, but history tells us otherwise: women athletes have long been subjected to belittlement, objectification, and ridicule for daring to compete on the same public stage as men. This latest stunt doesn’t just mock the WNBA—it reminds us that women’s achievements are still, far too often, treated as a sideshow.
As Audre Lorde warned, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We can’t ask AI — with its built-in anti-female biases — to justify why the son of our president participated in this stunt. His bad humor normalizes sexism, and laughing along only helps the house keep winning.