New York Post printed a nude photo of Melania Trump on the front page. Why?

So this is, um, different: The New York Post, which endorsed Donald Trump in the New York primary, published naked photos of Melania Trump on Sunday.

The pictures are from a photoshoot in 1995 for a French magazine, according to the Post. It’s unclear how the Post even obtained them.

Trump had not yet responded by the time the paper hit the newsstands. He told the Post:

Melania was one of the most successful models and she did many photo shoots, including for covers and major magazines. This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania. In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.

Trump’s communications director, Jason Miller, appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday and called the photos “a celebration of the human body.”

“We have nothing to be embarrassed about in these photos,” Miller said. “She’s a beautiful woman.”

But why did the Post publish them at all? While the paper certainly has a history of printing photos targeted at hurting candidates (see: their cover in 2008 with the photo from President Obama’s trip to Kenya) or nude photos (see: the shots of Ashley Dupre that ran in 2008), it seems odd that the solidly anti-Clinton paper would be running anti-Trump photos.

Or in the middle of a campaign season rife with sexism, is this to remind us that Trump has a beautiful former model as a wife? Is to promote the (BS) MRA belief that a woman should stay attractive for her husband? Or that a wife’s attractiveness somehow reflects on her husband’s manliness (also BS)?

Or are they supposed to distract us, the voters and the media? As Trump battles questions about his tax returns and his response to Khizr Khan‘s moving DNC speech, let’s face it: Can any of us say, honestly, that we will ignore nude photos of a famous person?

As Trump himself tweeted after Melania’s speech snafu:

Or maybe it’s none of the above. The Post headline proclaims: “Melania Trump, like you’ve never seen her before.” Maybe the Post had the photos and wanted to run them to sell newspapers, which is tough enough in this day and age.

It’s been a rough few weeks for Melania Trump: She was caught plagiarizing part of her speech at Republican National Convention, there have been questions about whether she really graduated college, she still lags far behind Michelle Obama in Facebook popularity and then this week, her website was scrubbed from the Internet.