Trump is dispatched against magazines that did not cover Melania
The magnate assures that his wife is "the greatest of all" and criticizes the snobbish and elitist fashion press.
Fashion magazines tend to always feature the most beautiful and elegant women in the world on their covers. And President Donald Trump, a few days after leaving his mandate in the White House, resents that Melania has not come out as many times as he deserved.
The president retweeted a Breitbart News publication that said: "The elite snobs of the fashion press have kept the most elegant First Lady in the history of the United States off the covers of their magazines for 4 years in a row." That publication on social networks showed that the discomfort that the president has for the press goes far beyond political coverage.
The greatest of all time. Fake News! https://t.co/jiWjLrynQW
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2020
According to the British media, The Independent, "as a former model, Melania Trump has appeared on magazine covers in the past, even on the cover of Vogue, after her marriage to Trump, but before she was first lady." Appearances decreased once he came to live in the White House. The media compares her with Michelle Obama who in the eight years of government she was covered 12 times in fashion publications.
An enigmatic first lady
Her cold gaze and Melania's distant demeanor have made her the most enigmatic first lady the United States has had in recent times. During the four years of her husband Melania's tenure, she did everything possible to stay out of any political issue. She fulfilled the responsibilities of the agenda, but did not pretend for a moment to be comfortable in the role of her American wife.
And it is that Melania did not marry a politician, she married a tycoon. The Slovenian-born supermodel speaks seven languages and began her career at age 16. At 28 she met Donald Trump at a party in New York when he was a real estate entrepreneur and she was the face of a clothing brand in Yugoslavia. Six years later, when she was modeling in adult magazines and he was hosting "The Apprentice," they got married.
It was Melania's first marriage and Trump's third. The celebration set the tone for the relationship, the engagement ring alone cost $ 3 million, the wedding dress cost $ 80,000 and the guest list surpassed a hundred celebrities. The Trumps were the couple of the moment and Melania fitted into the luxurious life that her husband had in New York.
She was never forced to build relationships with Trump's older children, who are only a few years old. Her role in the Trump mansion was more of a model than a mother. She until in 2006 when she became pregnant and dedicated herself to her only child, Barron William. "Donald is not very involved in raising him," she said in an interview, "but okay, the important thing in a marriage is knowing what each one does."
The huge smile that Melania wears in the photos of her wedding did not appear in the first days of the Presidency of her husband. The first sign that things in the White House would be different with the Trumps came shortly after the 2016 election. Melania announced that neither she nor her son Barron would be moving to Washington. Although she initially justified the decision with the school activities of the youngest of Trump's children, it later emerged that it was a pressure tactic for her husband to sign new capitulations in their prenuptial agreement.
She believed that with the Presidency the conditions of her marriage changed, and she was willing to do anything, including taking advantage of the womanizing accusations against her husband so that he would agree to modify some of her previous dealings. Her plan worked: Trump agreed and, a few days later, she arrived with her son at the White House and smiled again in the photos.
Melania's frequent rudeness to Trump fueled the idea that they actually live in a marriage where love is long over, if ever there was. On January 20, 2017, Trump assumed the Presidency and deep down Melania was opening her eyes in terror. The hashtag #FreeMelania (free Melania) was a trend for hours and the episode set the tone with which the public would read the relationship for the rest of the administration.
"It's a strange marriage," confessed the maid of one of their properties. “I never see them as a normal family, sitting at the same table, eating together, talking. Never. They spend time in the same place, but they never interact ”.
The distance in the Trump marriage collides with the images of previous presidents who always showed the kinder side of their family. Even Bill Clinton seemed closer to Hillary despite the scandal over her infidelities in the Oval Office. Trump didn't try too hard to maintain the facade and from the beginning he made it clear that he trusted his daughter Ivanka more than his own wife for official business.
Melania never intended to change the world from her position of power and she is not expected to try this time. She repeatedly took missteps that proved that her role was more figurative than active. Her first mistake was reading a plagiarized speech by Michelle Obama at the 2016 Republican convention when her husband was campaigning for the presidency. Since then she does not trust her team close to her and she prefers to be guided "by her own intuition", although not always with success.
On the rare occasions that Melania gets involved there is always a detail that appears to cloud her actions. At the launch of her “be best” initiative to fight cyberbullying and drug use, her comments focused on the fact that the name was not grammatically correct. On her visit to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, her comments focused on her $ 540 heels. Sometimes she does it with the intention of annoying her husband, other times she is simply wrong.
But despite her relative discretion, Melania has found a way to demonstrate her power in the White House. On more than one occasion, she has managed to get Trump to fire advisers who disavow her. The most notorious case was that of Mira Ricardel, deputy national security adviser, who argued with the first lady on a trip to Africa. Melania discreetly asked her husband to remove her from office and, given the refusal, published an unprecedented statement in which she said that “it is the position of the Office of the First Lady that Ricardel no longer deserves the honor of serving in this House. White ”.
Never before has a first lady publicly asked for the head of an official. But the strategy worked: Trump, enraged by the shame his wife was putting him through, had no choice but to remove Ricardel from her duties.
Despite the mixed signals, the book by Mary Jordan, the Washington Post's White House correspondent, assures that Melania is happier than she seems in her position. Rather than portraying her as a submissive woman trapped in her marriage, she describes her as manipulative, interested, and persevering. She “She is much more like him than she seems. They are both avid creators of their own story, ”says Jordan.
Now that her husband is leaving the White House, her role continues to generate rumors. It has been said that she accepted first that he defeated her and that she is the one who has insisted the most on making a simpler transit for her exit. Also that she has already looked at how her move will be and what her plans will be for her life away from Washington. For now, nothing is certain about what will come in January on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration, when the couple have to leave power.
