‘True believer’: Picture of Melania Trump’s posse tells us everything
New photos of the mysterious First Lady have revealed major clues about what’s really going on behind the scenes.
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OPINION
They say it’s shared interests that keeps a couple together, even after the kids are long gone and the spark has fizzled out like a dusty 40 watt globe.
Just ask Melania Trump.
A new picture has confirmed that she and Donald are lucky to still have plenty in common after 20 years of connubial hits-and-misses.
Shush, you. It’s not shagging early noughties porn stars or manhandling fried chicken or playing footsie with Vladimir Putin.
Mrs Trump might reportedly “f**king hate” her husband, but she has just fully endoresed him and proven herself to be on board with her husband’s politics as a true believer.
This week saw Mr Trump give a speech to a joint session of Congress – and while the women who surrounded his wife in the audience might have looked like a bunch of normies, they were not.
Rather, Mrs Trump’s choice of guests to sit in her personal box were people who represented some of the Republican Party’s biggest hot button, knickers-in-a-twist issues.
It was a tableau with all the nuance of a bald eagle’s talon to the eyeball.
Let me introduce you.
There was Payton McNabb, a North Carolina high school athlete who is lobbying for a ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. In 2022, she suffered a traumatic brain injury after being spiked on the head during a volleyball match and has claimed that her opponent was transgender.
Nearby were Allyson and Lauren Phillips, the mother and sister of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was killed last year by an undocumented immigrant.
Other guests included Helen, Allyson and Kaylee Comperatore, the widow and daughters of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed after Mr Trump was shot at during a 2024 political rally.
Then there was Marc Fogel and his 95-year-old mother, Malphine. In 2021, Fogel was arrested in Moscow for bringing medical marijuana into the country but was freed last month in a move that has been read as a gesture of goodwill on behalf of Vladimir Putin.
Anti-trans, anti-immigrant and cosying up to Mother Russia? Ding, ding, ding! My, Mrs Trump really was playing up to all of the president’s favourite high notes.
See, the former FHM model might have grown up during the dying days of Communism in the eastern bloc, but her personal politics are fire engine Republican red.
Take her ardent, reported disdain for the Democrats.
When her husband was elected the first time, back in 2017, Mrs Trump waited five months to actually join him and make the move from New York to Washington House.
Was it because she struggled to not gag at the sight of him shovelling Cap’n Crunch into his gob at the breakfast table every day?
No. She and Her Donald share another charming hobby, namely hating Democrats and the media.
Politico has reported that, according to former senior adviser and close friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff: “Melania didn’t want to move to the White House right away in part because she didn’t want to have to use the same shower and toilet as former first lady Michelle Obama and was waiting for the bathroom to be renovated”.
Likewise, Wolkoff, the author of 2020’s Melania and Me, recalls the first lady saying to her once during the first administration, “I’m driving liberals crazy. You know what? They deserve it”.
Last year, after a shooter attempted to assassinate Mr Trump during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Mrs Trump told Fox News she blamed the Democrats and the press for the attack, saying they were “fuelling a toxic atmosphere and giving power to all of these people who want to do harm to him”.
Last year, in her autobiography Melania, a title that only took three working groups, a white board and an extra large pot of coffee to come up with, she wrote “We are living in a dangerous time when it comes to journalism”.
Or remember The Jacket? You know, the one she wore in June 2018 when, off for a fun day trip to a migrant child detention centre, she donned a $US39 Zara jacket daubed with the words, “I really don’t care, do you?” (More than 4600 children were separated from their parents at the border and some were held in cages, according to Amnesty International).
In Melania, she explained she had chosen the jacket to hit back at the media for its “skewed narratives” and “negativity”.
She wrote that she wanted to send a message and that the controversial phrase was directed at “the people and for the left-wing media who [were] criticising me”.
Err, que? This member of the media definitely missed the point she was trying to make.
The former Slovenian model and university drop out is also fully on board with one of MAGA world’s most unhinged, doolally shared delusions – that the 2020 election was stolen. Mrs Trump has written that she “questions the results”.
On the day of the armed insurrection on January 6, 2020, Mrs Trump refused to issue a statement condemning the violence at the Capitol building, during which five people were killed, according to former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.
Then there are Mrs Trump’s views on race, calling out the “inflammatory rhetoric” of the leaders of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
In Melania, she declines to actually use the name George Floyd, whose murder sparked global protests, referring to him as a “Black Minneapolis resident”. Charming.
In her book, Mrs Trump gives over three paragraphs to Floyd’s murder – but dedicates more than three pages to the BLM protests of May 29, 2020 in Washington that sent the White House into lockdown.
The only key issue on which Mrs Trump has ever gone against her husband is abortion rights, coming out as pro-choice in her book.
What it comes down to is this: Mrs Trump might allegedly “hate” the man himself, but she is a True Believer in Trumpism.
In all of this, Mrs Trump is doing and saying exactly what she pleases, according to expert Melania-watchers, and not simply just parroting the party line.
“She does things the way she wants to do them, as opposed to the way she has to do them,” Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of communications at Boston University and author of a book on Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, told the BBC.
Meanwhile, her actual interest in being First Lady appears to be about as fervent as her desire to be in the same postcode as her dearest.
Former press secretary Grisham in her book writes of the first administration: “I could count only a handful of times over the years that Mrs Trump was actually in her office. She preferred to run things via text or phone calls”.
“The First Lady kept to her rooms in the residence. That became a running joke among those who knew her. The Secret Service unofficially dubbed her ‘Rapunzel’ because she remained in her tower, never descending.”
Just in case you are tempted to part with the $52.95 it will set you back to buy Melania for yourself, let me leave you with a pretty wild theory that has emerged about the book.
Last week, respected long-time Trump World watcher, author Michael Wolff, revealed his “theory [that] it’s the first AI-written bestseller”.
“There’s no one even thanked in the book probably because there is no one to thank,” he told The Daily Beast’s podcast.
Could it be true?
Well, a healthy aversion to anything dangerously like hard work would be truly Trumpian. The President, during his first go round, famously watched cable news for four hours every morning and in 2018, Vanity Fair reported that “on a good day” he managed three hours in the office.
See? Just another wonderful thing the couple might share.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘True believer’: Picture of Melania Trump’s posse tells us everything
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