Warning: This story contains graphic images of pornography.
Tom Chandler had a dream. It was a simple dream, but it was a beautiful dream, nonetheless.
Chandler envisioned a world where millions of Americans would get home from a long day at work and open up their web browser to a porn site—only to catch an unexpected glimpse of 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump staring down at them, accompanied by a line from his infamous taco bowl tweet: “I love Hispanics!”
If you’ve frequented the massively popular porn tube site Pornhub this week, chances are you saw Chandler’s dream realized.
That ad, which is tied to Pornhub search terms like “Latino,” has been all over the site this week, but it isn’t the only one. There are also ads that pop-up connected to terms like “black” or “ebony.”
There’s one based on an interview Trump gave with radio shock jock Howard Stern about anal sex, where the search term should be obvious.
There’s also a piece of advice Trump once gave about how to treat women.
Pornhub
Other ads in the series reference Trump quotes on everything from disseminating misinformation about the transmission of HIV to a stream of gibberish noises.
Here’s how the ads look in context on the Pornhub site (warning: NSFW).
https://imgur.com/gallery/NO7lA
Clicking on the ads leads users to the official website of the Trump-Pence campaign, where the nice donation amount of $69 is already filled in as a suggestion.
While a link to Trump’s donation page may make this ad campaign seem like an effort to bolster Trump’s quest for the Oval Office, what’s going on is far more interesting and far more ambivalent about a Trump presidency.
According to Chandler, the goal is to get people to reconsider some of the things Trump has said by forcing people to look at them in an unexpected location—an intrusion of the political realm into something that, for most people, is a deeply personal and private act.
“A lot of people—and I think it’s especially prevalent in Trump supporters, but it’s there in everyone—have a public persona of being someone who supports a particular presidential candidate,” he explained. “And then, when you go home and you are by yourself, a lot of people then look at porn. That’s the time they’re thinking least about politics. You are having an intimate moment and then a quote from Trump, someone you may have publicly supported earlier in the day, pops up saying, ‘You have to treat women like shit.’ I think that’s really jarring and makes you confront how those different personalities exist within your own system.”
Chandler is part of a loose group of eight people who are behind the ads. That group contains both people who support Trump and people who oppose him. Similarly, the ads themselves are open for interpretation.
“I think that’s really jarring and makes you confront how those different personalities exist within your own system.”
“I don’t know if it’s pro-Tump or anti-Trump or anti-Hillary, because we’ve had literally all four of those views come out in this campaign,” he noted. “I’m going to come off like an artist in saying this, and that’s not my intent, but really how people receive this is depending on what camp they’re in. If they’re in the Trump camp, they think it’s really brilliant and they think that the campaign is doing it and they love it. If they are in the Hillary camp, they’re like this is hilarious satire, and they’re so glad they’re voting for Hillary because they can’t believe the stuff this guy has said.”
Chandler says he views this primarily as an informational campaign, one that is explicitly political rather than simply an exercise in high-concept performance art.
Even so, the ads technically are encouraging donations to the Trump campaign, and U.S. election laws do apply.
Chandler says he hasn’t formally registered as a super PAC, but he may do so in the future if his efforts expand. However, since the group hasn’t raised or spent in excess of $1,000, it hasn’t met the threshold required for registration of a nonconnected PAC as per Federal Election Commission rules.
Chandler’s group spent a couple hundred dollars with TrafficJunky, a porn industry-specific advertising network, which has resulted in over 2 million impressions thus far.
“Knowing that we have made 2 million people’s nights a whole lot more interesting by flashing that in front of them at really inconvenient times has made the project a success,” he said with a laugh. “I guess wild success would be something like having the Trump campaign comment on this and say they don’t approve of porn because he did sign an anti-porn resolution. There’s no way that’s going to happen. They’d be insane to bring attention to it.”
Representatives from the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
On the social news site Reddit, the ads attracted some attention. “I feel like that would go against the purpose of porn,” commented one Reddit user going by the handle skinsboi. “Instant boner-killer.”
