Melania’s Swat Proves She Hates Donald As Much As America
The first lady’s hand slap heard around the world is far from the first time she has shown contempt for her husband. Welcome to the club.
Maybe Melania Trump, a woman who was once photographed for Vanity Fair stuffing a bowl of expensive necklaces like it’s spaghetti, has more in common with the average American than we thought. at the beginning. Like the average American, it seems she too can’t stand her husband.
This afternoon in Tel Aviv, President Donald Trump reached out to his wife. Rather than offer her a human touch, the kind of human touch that ordinary married people who love each other might engage in, the reluctant First Lady brushed her hand away. It wasn’t done behind the scenes before an event, or in the privacy of a place where it was safe to assume there were no cameras. No, Melania has grown bolder in her willingness to telegraph her disdain for Donald. She did so as she and her husband joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife for a photo op. She did it in front of a real UN of news cameras. She did it for the whole world to see. She doesn’t care if he’s embarrassed, and it completely rules.
lol look at melania’s hand
pic.twitter.com/hQ2FGZL2Q4— Jordan (@JordanUhl)
May 22, 2017
And the whole world saw; within minutes, the moment had gone viral. With that swat, Melania had temporarily satiated the public’s bottomless appetite to see President Trump deny what he wanted in his most viscerally appealing manifestation. Trump wanted his wife to accept him, to join him in acting like a normal human couple in front of the cameras instead of a wannabe orb-stroking despot. Seeing tweets about a judge overturning an immigration ban, or watching a Trump surrogate get ass fucked on cable news just doesn’t taste as delicious to a victory-hungry liberal as the image of a woman slapping Trump’s hand. For the millions who continue to be horrified by the Trump era, there’s nothing more up-to-date in 2017 than Trump schadenfreude porn. And there’s no one better suited to deliver it than our First Lady Ice Queen.
This isn’t the first time that Melania has denied Donald’s undersized hands the pleasure of human touch. In January, when the couple arrived in Washington for their inauguration, Donald tried to hold his wife’s hand just before completing the very frightening task of descending a flight of stairs. Melania didn’t have it.
The move kicked off a grand opening weekend that, from Melania’s perspective, would read like a novel about a tragically trapped princess, or a live-action Pepe Le Pew cartoon starring Melania as the cat. When the couple danced, Melania leaned in rigidly. At every public appearance, the impeccably dressed First Lady wore a veil of despair. Her husband often seemed to forget that she existed. When they kissed, they did not touch. Melania acted as a mascot of leftist desperation.
In the weeks that followed, Melania’s public contempt for her husband only intensified. A US Weekly cover story said she was “secretly miserable” as First Lady, a story I have to dispute as it has always been obvious that she is miserable. She skipped the typical first lady duties during the visit of the Prime Minister of Japan. And a few weeks ago, whoever runs his verified Twitter account favorited a Tweet about how the Trumps seem alienated from each other.
This is all happening while Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, performs most of the First Lady’s non-romantic duties, giving speeches and posing for photos. In recent interviews, Ivanka has even started having a weird Jackie O effect. If I were Melania, I’d find the whole thing boring.
Critics will point out that Melania, of course, is neither a heroine nor a saint. She’s the one who married Donald, and she can leave whenever she’s tired of living in a golden box in the sky and feeling sorry for herself. There are many women whose lives are much worse because of the president, and many more whose lives would be worse without the saving grace of checks and balances. But his public play offers a beautiful lightness for a time that often seems devoid of it; many women would like the opportunity to wave Trump’s hand away.
Melania’s jabs also serve to expose another Trump lie: When you’re a star, they don’t always let you.
