The Freeform comedy Grownish follows Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) after she leaves her family home on ABC's Blackish and goes off to college. She's growing up and learning new things and, on the February 14 episode "Erase Your Social," the lesson is about how to handle social media. Of course, they decided to make it about Trump.
Zoey finds out that one of her friends, Nomi (Emily Arlook), finds joy trolling people online, especially people who are popular like Janelle Monae and Anna Kendrick. She wants Zoey's roommate Ana (Francia Raisa) to get in on the fun and, in doing so, tries to talk up trolling. She says that trolling has actually changed the course of history.
Nomi: Trolling is the great American art form. I mean, think about it. We finally get to take shots at whoever we want, whenever we want, with no repercussions. I mean, look at our president. He trolled his way into the White House.
The thing is, the data shows that even Trump's supporters think that his tweets are risky, easily misunderstood, and are too often are in response to something he sees on television. His voters also think that his tweets are to be blamed for troubles that he has. It sounds like they agree with South Park that Trump should "put it down" and that it is not the reason he got into the White House.
Aaron (Trevor Jackson) is having social media troubles of his own. He is proud of the fact that "I never like, comment, post, retweet anything unless it aligns with my, you know, political progressive vision." However, when he shared something titled "Immigration Isn't the Problem," he didn't realize that the piece argued that the problem is "Mexican gay Muslims," and now he is "the black voice of the alt-right." One of his new followers is Ted Nugent and Aaron's pretty upset about that. He describes Nugent as follows: "I want you to picture Satan, but he's from Michigan and he wears a cowboy hat."
What's with liberals comparing people to "Satan?" Grownish has done a pretty good job of staying away from politics (unlike Blackish, from which this is a spin-off), but this episode not only went political, it did it poorly.
