Why I’ve finally warmed to Melania Trump, who is only guilty of one sin
A world away from her aloof public image, the former first lady emerges from her memoir as a warm and defiant figure – and, says Sean O’Grady, if her husband wins the presidential election, we must hope she sticks around…
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Your support makes all the difference.Poor Melania Trump (née Knavs). When she got involved with Donald Trump about a quarter of a century ago, she must have thought she would end up married to a super-wealthy, rather idiosyncratic property developer with a tendency to overcompensate for his insecurities and a taste for publicity of the adulatory kind. She couldn’t have dreamt she’d end up as first lady of the United States of America.
Sadly, she is now despised by a goodly section of the world simply because she married “that man”.
As a former model – she was introduced to Trump in 1998 at a New York Fashion Week party – she is used to scrutiny of a particularly intense kind. But the way her every facial expression and hand gesture is examined on slo-mo videos, turned into social media memes and used against her husband can’t be healthy for anyone involved.
With the probable exception of Hillary Clinton, no other first lady has been subjected to such invasions into their private life. You cannot help but feel sympathy.
The very fact that Melania is still around is something of a personal vindication. Her newly published memoir, Melania, suggests that she is a bit more of her own woman than is sometimes made out. Indeed, she comes across as quite an attractive, warm personality, rather at odds with her aloof, feline demeanour.
Maybe she does care after all – in contrast to the time, during a trip to a migrant child detention centre, she wore a parka with the slogan “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” emblazoned across the back.
She has had a lot to contend with, quite aside from the fact that her husband hasn’t always been well behaved. The latest barb came indirectly from the late Queen Elizabeth, courtesy of the habitually ungallant and indiscreet Boris Johnson, or “Britain Trump” as the former president calls him.
In his latest tedious and embarrassing collection of anecdotes, Johnson alleges that the Queen believed that President Trump “must have some sort of arrangement” with his wife Melania, “or else why would she have remained married to him?” I imagine it would not be the first time such thoughts have crossed anyone’s mind.
But no matter: Melania is standing by her man – as we saw in her post-assassination video, and she can speak for herself. She may be married to one of the most loathsome, deranged and dangerous creatures ever to waddle across God’s green earth, a man who should long ago have been jailed, but he’s her monster and she’s sticking with him.
Like any mother, she is defiant. Her memoir tells how she had to defend her sole child, Barron, from the scurrilous allegations that he is autistic, and helped him cope with the consequent school bullying. It pulls you up short, because in a moment you can see how a blameless young boy might have his life destroyed simply because of the behaviour of his father.
After reading Melania, one wonders if she might not even vote for Trump. She isn’t a very political creature, but she is clearly pro-choice, in stark contrast to her husband’s (current) attitude, and very much at odds with the fundamentalist trends in the contemporary, Maga-dominated Republican Party.
Melania declares, as if she were speaking at a Kamala Harris rally: “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.”
Perhaps, if the calamity of a second Trump presidency descends upon the world, she will be some kind of civilising influence on her erratic, resentful, vengeful spouse. She may be all we’ve got, so we should hope she’s going to stick around – whatever her arrangement with Donald.
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