Melania Trump's efforts to tackle cyber-bullying should probably start with these tweets from her husband

During his campaign, Trump has tweeted an insult on average every 42 hours. The list is exhaustive, ranging from insults against the Oval Office podium to the song ‘Rockin’ the Free World’

Melania Trump (AP)

By declaring that she will dedicate her time as First Lady to tackling cyber-bullying on social media, Melania Trump has really set the bar low for herself – all she’d have to do, after all, is take her husband’s smartphone away from him.

Despite comments that her speech is yet another public blunder for Melania, I’m sure she knows exactly what she is doing. She understands that with her unique access to Donald’s lair she alone holds the key to solving this growing epidemic. All she needs to do is to change the password on his Twitter or at least to hide the phone for a few hours per night so as to avoid another 3am moment – like when Donald Trump told the whole of the United States of America to go check out Alicia Machado’s sex tape. “What, honey? No, I haven’t seen your phone since this afternoon. Maybe Barron hid it under one of the gold Eros & Psyche statues you insist on cluttering the place up with.”

Melania, of course, knows that Trump is losing out on the white college-educated female vote by around 12 points, and that only by putting an end to his online rants will her husband have a hope in hell of getting into the White House.

With only four days to go until election day, women have already crowned Trump King of the Subtweet and there’s no way of wiggling out of this one – the New York Times has already kindly listed the 281 different people, places, and things that Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter. Compiled on the 497th day of his campaign, that breaks down to an average of an insult every 42 hours.

The list is exhaustive, ranging from insults against the Oval Office podium to the song ‘Rockin’ the Free World’ (“didn’t love it”). It goes without saying that Hillary Clinton bears the brunt of his phone-tapping rages, but it’s not the constant cries that Hillary is “crooked” that make Trump a cyber-bully. Insults are par for the course in politics and bullying isn’t about punching up by taking shots at the system. Rather, it’s the way Trump punches down that should be cause for concern – sometimes quite literally.

Back in February, Trump told a crowd of supports that if they happened to see protesters, who he had earlier labelled as “thugs” on Twitter, getting ready to throw tomatoes, they should “knock the crap out of them.” Proving that he has more money than sense he added: “I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”

Trump is no fan of the media – which is fine in the abstract, but when he singles out one reporter the way he did with NBC’s Katy Tur, it constitutes as the worst sort of bullying. After calling her “incompetent” and “dishonest” on Twitter at this month’s rally in Miami, he turned his fans against her: “We have massive crowds. There’s something happening. They’re not reporting it. Katy — you’re not reporting it, Katy”. With the 4,000-strong crowd jeering at her, the secret service was forced to protect the journalist as she walked to her car following the event.

It’s no secret that Trump has also managed to insult the whole of womankind. Echoing Clinton herself, Barack Obama said at a recent rally that the 70-year-old GOP candidate had spent a “lifetime calling women pigs and dogs and slobs”. Trump, of course, infamously called Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy” after she put on weight following her Miss Universe win.

Then there are the tweets against women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault. He has tweeted that their claims are “totally phoney”, “100% made up”, “already proven false”, “made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED”, “totally made up nonsense to steal the election”, “100% fabricated”, “pushed strongly by the media and the Clinton Campaign” and “may poison the minds of the American Voter”.

And in the recent child rape allegation brought against Trump, the lawsuit alleges that the Republican nominee threatened the claimant, known as Jane Doe, telling her she and her family “would be physically harmed, if not killed” if she came forward.

Hope springs eternal – and Melania Trump seemingly has faith that there’s still time to bring her husband’s online insult average down and change the course of history. Either that, or her central campaign as First Lady will end up as one of the most deliciously ironic moves ever made in American politics.