Ten months ago, BuzzFeed News published a dossier that contained, among many other unproven allegations, the claim that President Donald Trump once hired multiple Russian prostitutes for the express purpose of having them urinate on each other in a bed that then-President Barack Obama had once used. The entire episode, the dossier reported, had been taped.
Although evidence of the existence of the “pee tape” remains inconclusive — and Trump has denied anything like that happened, noting his longstanding reputation as a germaphobe — the U.S. intelligence community took the dossier in general and its author seriously, and an awful lot of people are well aware of this particular claim.
You wouldn’t know that from reading the news.
There’s nothing particularly obscene about urination (we all do it). But for some reason, multiple major news outlets can’t seem to bring themselves to describe the allegations against the president in simple, straightforward terms. In those 10 months since the dossier was first made public, journalists have danced around the dirty thing the president supposedly did.
In no particular order, here are some of our favorite entirely unhelpful ways to not say “the president maybe paid women to pee on each other.” Enjoy.
