‘Top woman’: Surprising person taking over Melania Trump’s place
President Donald Trump is turning his attention to a surprising person as his wife Melania gives him the cold shoulder.
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OPINION
Allow me to be the first person to introduce you to the most important woman in the United States whose name is not Oprah Winfrey: SLOTUS.
It might sound like the covfefe of slurs – ohmygodMichelleyouaresuchaSLOTUS – but she might be top woman in the circus of misfit toys and fillered-to-the-gills community college lawyers in magenta Barbie power suits that Donald Trump has surrounded himself with.
I mean, of course, the Second Lady of the United States, aka SLOTUS, Usha Vance.
Mrs Vance is the wife of Vice President JD Vance, and last week marked her most high-profile public event yet, having been tapped by Mr Trump to lead a shiny deployment to an indignant Greenland.
It might not immediately seem like a real boon of a jolly – to be dumped on a remote ice shelf at quite literally the end of the world – but SLOTUS’ trip marks her first serious move in a role that is shaping up to be First Lady Lite.
She has some real size 10 Christiaan Louboutins to fill.
The actual FLOTUS, Melania Trump, has not been seen in Washington for nearly a month, having long become like the abominable no-show-woman of the capital, briefly appearing to prowl along a corridor to give resting rich face, only to then evaporate back into the night. Mrs Trump’s interest level in first ladying is up there with her husband’s in kimchi, the finer points of Japanese minimalist poetry and answering Eric’s calls.
And what that means is that there is a major job vacancy right at the heart of the American government.
So, welcome to the stage Mrs Vance – a 39-year-old who until July 14, 2024 was a high-flying lawyer.
Mrs Vance is still something of an enigma.
Her mouth says MAGA, but her background tells a different story.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri was a “bookworm”, childhood friends told The New York Times, who grew up to study at Yale and then Cambridge and who was a registered Democrat as recently as 2014.
Not inconsequentially, that was the same year she married Mr Vance in Kentucky followed by a Hindu blessing. The couple went on to have three kids.
Up until Mr Vance officially joined the Trump ticket in July last year, she worked for a West Coast and Washington law firm that describes its culture as “radically progressive”.
Last week, announcing her Greenland trip, Mrs Vance made headlines sure to have turned her husband’s boss’ face puce (if that had been possible under his seven shellacked layers of out-of-date Revlon Sunrise Surprise base) after sharing a video proudly displaying a copy of climate alarm bellringer Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance in the background.
(Que? I thought a rapidly warming Earth was the hysterical work of the socialist left – that is, when they could take a break from writing childrens’ books about trans dolphins?)
Anyhoo, last year on the campaign trail, it hardly sounded like Mrs Vance was really champing at the Washington bit, saying “I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD, and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life”.
And what has happened has been that she is the only wife willing to stick around the White House – and she is now being shunted out the front door to pick up the slack and to do PR opps like being posted to Greenland to try and persuade the tiny territory to let the United States handsily grab it.
As things stand now, I hope she likes travelling to remote bits of random countries that host US military installations and the rocky outcrops in the South China Sea which Mr Trump is keen to get his sticky fingers on, because I foresee quite a bit of Air Force Two-ing in her future.
(It was only after JD ‘Just Do It’ Vance was caught out talking about war plans in a group chat that the Trumpinator suddenly had the idea to punt him off too to chilly Greenland, in a case of literally being sent to the freezer).
Even when she’s not being sent off to strategic bits of someone else’s country, Mrs Vance has been playing her dutiful part to support Trump & co.
In the last two months, the Vances have been dispatched to Paris to meet with Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, Mrs Vance prominently attended the State of the Union joint address to congress, she hosted Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin and his wife for a St Patrick’s Day event in Washington and she travelled to Germany with Mr Vance for the laugh-a-minute Munich Security Conference. (At least Angela Merkel had a tight line in knock-knock jokes back in the day).
It hasn’t all been fun and games and listening to Chancellor Olaf Scholtz’s dismal line in the smallest of small talk.
When the Vances turned up at the Kennedy Centre for a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra earlier this month, they were loudly booed by the rest of the audience.
In February, when the second family travelled to Vermont for a skiing holiday – the day after Mr Trump and Mr Vance’s egregious Oval Office bullying of Ukrainian President Volodmyrr Zelenskly – their motorcade was forced to drive along roads lined with hundreds of protesters.
The Vance marriage is very much the riddliest of riddles and JD himself gave us a nice look inside their dynamic when he recently made some creepy-as-hell comments about his wife of 11 years.
While speaking at a plastics factory in Michigan he said, “I’m so proud to have her by my side. And here’s the thing, because the cameras are all on, anything that I say, no matter how crazy, Usha has to smile and laugh and celebrate it … I’m going to be good though, honey”.
Forget all those years of Yale and Cambridge and tens of thousands of billable hours clawing her way up the legal hierarchy and thinking. That’s Mrs Vance’s sole job now: To smile. To really give us some nice teeth. She is the First And A Half Lady, and her options now could be handily jotted down on one of Pete Hegseth’s soggy beer coasters.
Mrs Trump might not have one degree, but I’m starting to think she’s the far cannier of the two women.
Mrs Trump is never going to have to go to Nuuk, which I now know is the capital of Greenland, and never will.
Nuuk thank you.
She’d barely go past Ninth Avenue.
And as for smiling?
Forget about it.
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 ‘Top woman’: Surprising person taking over Melania Trump’s place
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