Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and Nairobi, Kenya, and the author of the book "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness." Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) Donald Trump is a piggish, unrepentant misogynist who has demonstrated that he thinks women are only as valuable as their physical appearance, a gutter perspective he made clear again when he called Stormy Daniels "horseface" on Twitter Tuesday. So why in the world would his opponents stoop to his level?

Jill Filipovic

That's what rapper T.I. did recently in a music video clip he tweeted, in which a Melania Trump lookalike strips in the Oval Office, dancing for T.I.'s pleasure after the President leaves the White House. The point was to stick it to the President. But the means was the same tool the President uses: Misogyny.

T.I.'s message is fairly straightforward: Women are extensions of men, and it is humiliating for a man to have "his" woman stripping for someone else. Sexually objectifying Melania is a shortcut way of demeaning both her and her husband.

That humiliation relies on the same tropes used by Trump: There are "good" women and "bad" women, and a woman being either sexual or insufficiently attractive puts her in the "bad" category; that if you want to demean a woman, paint her as either slutty or ugly.

There are a lot of ways to mock Trump that don't depend on the same sexist narratives that in a better world would have disgraced this presidency. The T.I. video isn't one of them.

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