NO MORE MULLIGANS FOR MELANIA
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Up until last week, I felt
badly for Melania Trump when she was mocked or criticized. Sure, it can fairly be argued that she knew what she was getting into when she married The Donald, that she may
have had incentives other than storybook romantic love, and that she has
reaped the expected financial benefits from the union. But that stuff, I thought, did not
make her a bad person. I even gave her a mulligan when she wore
six-inch stilettos on her trip to visit hurricane victims.
And the fact that her husband
is a narcissistic, lying asshole almost makes her worthy of sympathy.
A recent NPR interview program
featured a Vanity Fair author who wrote a serious book about the Trumps. The
writer described Melania as intelligent and fiercely independent: she does only
what she wants to do. Taken by itself, an admirable quality.
Unlike her predecessor, for the first year of her position as First Lady, Melania chose to be absolutely silent on political issues. Fair enough. But when her husband was roundly criticized for his decision to
use children as hostages in his nativist anti-immigration campaign, Melania for
the first time revealed what was inside the shell.
I recognize she doesn't
control her husband, but she was a mother who had claimed every advantage for her
child, (much of which was at the expense of U.S. taxpayers,) and while I did
not expect her publicly to criticize the cruel Trump-Sessions policy, the least
she could have done was to continue her sphinx-like public silence on political
issues.
Instead, we got this sequence
of events:
On June 14, Jeff Sessions publicly
quoted a Bible passage in support of the President's child-separation
policy. The quote had formerly been
employed in opposition to those who argued for the abolition of slavery. It was from
Romans 13, and it commanded all persons to "obey the government because God has ordained the government for his
purposes."
On June 17, First Lady
Melania Trump issued a public statement on the child-separation policy. It brought to mind her husband's
"balanced" statement that there were "good people on both
sides" of the white supremacists' Charlottesville riots. Melania said
while the country should "govern with a heart," she believed "we need to be a country that follows all
laws."
This from an immigrant mom,
who used her status not only to protect every aspect of her child's emotional comfort,
but to bring her parents into the United States under a "chain
migration" policy denigrated by her husband. Compare this, please, to
the statement issued by former First Lady Laura Bush, endorsed by former First
Lady Michelle Obama. Laura Bush did not
equivocate: she called the Trump policy "cruel" and
"inhuman."
Five days after Melania Trump
issued her offensive statement, the public opposition to the Trump policy was
so great, the "I-never-back-down" President was forced to fold. (Of course, he did so in a classic Trumpian manner that still leaves 2,000 children
separated from their parents with no effective program to re-unite them, and no
clear policy going forward.)
In the midst of the public
outrage, Melania Trump made a carefully staged visit to a facility where unaccompanied
immigrant minors were confined. Only sixty-five kids were maintained there, and
less than ten of them had been separated from their parents by Trump's Zero
Tolerance policy. The video of the visit showed her scripted interview with the
institution Director, in which she thanked the keepers for doing good work, and
then inquired about the welfare of his inmates.
The Orwellian Doublespeak video could
have been titled "1984 in 2018, Produced
by Kellyanne Conway."
And of course, the dominant
feature of Mrs. Trump's visit was her attire. While she never before had appeared in public wearing
anything costing fewer than four figures to the left of the decimal point, for this visit the
First Lady donned a $39.00 (retail) coat bearing the printed message, "I DON'T
REALLY CARE, DO U?" She wore it boarding the plane to visit the facility where the children were kept, and
the press went nuts over the insulting language. She nevertheless donned it again
on the return trip to Washington. The White House immediately offered contradictory explanations. None is explicable. WYSIWYG.
Even before the coat incident,
Charles Blow had published a piece in the New York Times that said it much better
than I could. It was entitled "The King and Queen of Cruelty," and in
case you missed it, here it is. If you have read it before, please read it again.
A bientot.