Opinion
Melania
Trump
Melania
Trump is no caped crusader for women’s rights. She’s still Donald’s fig leaf
Catherine
Bennett
Casting the
first lady as a feminist obviously has its attractions. And yet...
Sat 7 Dec
2019 18.00 GMT
The
spectacle of Melania Trump at the Nato celebrations, inside an outfit that
looked half papal, half gobstopper, was not the neatest fit with older,
possibly inaccurate perceptions of pallid misery and a mutinous resolve to
reserve a separate identity from the old goat she, however inexplicably,
married.
Consider
the handholding. Previously, she was widely admired for a very relatable
reluctance to touch Trump – witnessed in the celebrated Tel Aviv hand-swat.
Last week, the couple handheld, practically snuggling their way round the
summit, or as much as a gigantic poncho ever allows. At an event that exposed,
to the largest of audiences, Donald Trump’s more comical deficiencies, his
alleged victim appeared all loyalty. Stockholm syndrome? Or could Mrs Trump,
hardly a feminist icon from the start, have long been the object of spurious
concern, sympathy, wishful thinking?
Without doubt, the garment signified
something. Or other
In the
absence of fellow partners and any recorded interest in Nato’s strategic goals,
it was not clear why Melania attended the event, let alone in a hi-vis cape,
never removed indoors, which would get an average person followed around a
department store by teams of detectives. Crusading? Nursing? Could we have a
quick look underneath there, madam? There was definitely room for medical
supplies. Maybe doctors had, wisely as it turned out, recommended some sort of
rapid response unit for any Trumpian crisis that might be triggered by
international, specifically Canadian, disrespect: “Get your cape, Melania,
we’re leaving.” How much more painfully humiliating, if he’d ended lumbering
home alone, only Donald knows.
Without
doubt, the garment signified something. Or other. In a new book, Free, Melania:
The Unauthorized Biography, the CNN reporter Kate Bennett dwells on her
subject’s use of fashion “as a messaging tool”. After the “pussy-grabbing”
tape, for instance, Melania appeared in a pink pussy bow. After the Stormy
Daniels revelations, she wore “a bright white Christian Dior pantsuit with
matching white button-down shirt”. Bennett translates: “Whatever she was trying
to say with that suit, and she was trying to say something, it had a message,
and the message was nothing to do with supporting Trump.” Maybe it was in
Slovenian.
Some of the
more mysterious things about Mrs Trump – that she rarely smiles, endures serial
humiliation by the lifelong pussy-grabber – can be attributed to Melania’s
heritage: “If you understand Slovenians, you know they are not a grinning
country.” Same with divorce: “She was, like most women in Slovenia, not only
raised a Catholic but also trained to take the bad with the good, even if the
bad was really, really bad.” Such endurance has not previously been tested,
obviously, on Slovenians married to orange narcissists who sentence countless
Kurds to death.
But
misunderstandings are inevitable when a person combines clothes messaging with
being, as Bennett also decides, “the most enigmatic first lady in modern
history”. Even the infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” Zara parka that the
first lady modelled at a Texan border camp was not, in Bennett’s analysis, a
message to an incredulous world, but to her step-daughter Ivanka (because
Ivanka shops at Zara). It meant: stop taking credit for stopping the separation
of migrant families. “There are no coincidences with Melania Trump.”
This is by
no means the most counterproductive anecdote in a book committed to showing
that Melania’s is an impressive, independent identity – hence the title’s comma
– but with little other than her proximity to Trump to work with. Though she
likes gold stuff and flowers. Enough to make her “one of the few creatives who
has ever been first lady”. Anything else? She is “uncommonly beautiful”.
“Luminous”. “Hypnotic”. One need hardly add that the barge she sat in, like a
burnish’d throne, burned on the water.
To return
to Bennett, (who surely, on the book’s evidence, deserves a role as the
Washington Cleopatra’s handmaiden or, better still, press secretary): “Then
there’s the way she smells. She has a distinct, noticeable fragrance, even to
those who generally don’t notice such things.” Her voice? “Neither too high nor
too low.” Her “signature” wave? “Far more comfortable for putting others at
ease than, say, Hillary Clinton’s perfunctory side-to-side wave or Michelle
Obama’s full-forearm windshield wiper.”
As with Carrie Symonds, Melania has benefited
from a feminist impulse to respect women as independent of their partners
Supposing
the hagiography does dispel, as it should, lingering suspicions of victimhood,
the corollary must surely be a new, less forgiving acknowledgment that Melania,
performing in public as shagger’s lustrous helpmeet, is complicit in her
country’s disgrace. Bennett confirms that Melania broadly agrees with her
husband’s politics and urged him to run. But, as with Carrie Symonds in the UK,
Melania, allegedly condescended to by feminists, has in reality benefited from
a feminist impulse to respect women as independent of their partners.
Since
Melania chooses, however, not only to busy herself with table landscapes but
with staged proofs of allegiance, so as to advance the proposition that Trump
is not, regardless of the evidence, the embodiment of cruelty and sexism, it is
unclear that feminist principles should help with the detoxifying. Leave that
to his latest press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, recommended by both Melania
(her previous charge) and by the heavily indebted Bennett. Melania, according
to Grisham, is “very funny”. She uses emojis. Endorsing these endorsements, the
PR herself is praised for having served journalists “warm chocolate chip
cookies and milk”.
As much,
then, as this glowing account owes to a White House official (the one currently
savaging Nancy Pelosi and Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan), it confirms
what must be obvious to anyone fluent in cape-language: Melania Trump is as
valuable to the political interests of her husband, the sexual predator, as
Symonds, the animal lover and Tory campaigner, is to selling her own
incontinently lying partner’s #getbrexitdone project. It really would be
condescending, considering the women’s strenuous promotional work, not to
believe them implicated in its consequences.
• Catherine
Bennett is an Observer columnist
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