President Donald Trump’s first lady, Melania Trump, is polling poorly and mired in a legal dispute with her biographer, journalist Michael Wolff. Yet according to one conservative commentator, Melania Trump is not really serving the role of first lady at all — that distinction belongs to her husband, the ostensible president.
“Donald Trump is a terrible president, and he’s an even worse first lady,” conservative commentator Kevin D. Williamson wrote for The Dispatch on Monday. “Things are falling apart in Iran, oil has been back over $100 a barrel, inflation is still inflating, and the president is out there spending his time with … party planning and decorating.”
Williamson, a longtime Republican, then proceeded to argue that the previous “worst first lady” was Hillary Clinton, wife of President Bill Clinton, for “derailing her husband’s first term by inserting herself into a national fight over healthcare and health insurance that proved too complex and demanding for her modest abilities.” Comparing the erstwhile Secretary of State to Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC), who was appointed to replace her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham, Williamson added that “Mrs. Clinton was presented with the gift of a Senate seat as a tribute to the career of a shifty male family member who never let himself get tied down by the bonds of matrimony, and then she was humiliatingly defeated by inexperienced tyros in every election she contested for another office.”
Unlike the Clintons, however, the Trumps are not presiding over a period of peace and prosperity, and therefore according to Williamson cannot expect the same amount of public goodwill.
“President Trump, a considerably bigger creep, has jumped combover-first into a 1970s-style stew of inflation intensified by unpopular—and failed—warmaking,” Williamson wrote. “And so Trump is out painting the town. Literally.”
He added, “Among his other Louis XIV-meets-American Psycho efforts at beautifying Washington—hell of a job with that reflecting pool, you [13-letter expletive participle deleted] incompetents!—Trump proposes to paint the Eisenhower Building, a perfectly fine old stone pile that is reasonably inoffensive by the standards of the hideously crypto-fascist grotesquely bloated Brutalist imperially pagan capital pseudo-city. The Eisenhower Building is granite-colored, on account of its being made of granite; Trump proposes to spend millions of dollars to make it white, like the people he prefers to rent to.”
Williamson continued, “Why? There’s the obvious thing—that he really is a short-fingered vulgarian who will work overtime to make things ugly whenever and wherever he can, even if that means giving all of Washington a case of architectural Mar-a-Lago face.” What’s more, Williamson pointed out that Trump can distract America from his various unpopular policies by redirecting attention to low-stakes controversies involving various beautification projects.
“Trump very much seems like he is attempting to gin up some relatively low-stakes controversies to distract Americans’ attention, or at least divide it, lest in the muggy dog days they start thinking too deeply (I know, I know) about the fact that the president has launched an open-ended and failing war in the Middle East,” Williamson concluded, “apparently because he thought it would be as easy and as cost-free as murdering boatloads of Latin Americans on the high seas for … some reason.”
As for the literal first lady, Melania Trump has also faced her fair share of controversies, most notably those involving her ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Melania downplays that connection, but her husband has been accused of sexually assaulting at leasttwo minor girls as a result of his association with the late child sex trafficker. Among other things, she was repeatedly referred to as “sweet pea” by Epstein’s close aide Ghislaine Maxwell and had a casual friendship with Maxwell. In one 2016 email sent to Epstein from a redacted sender, Melania Trump is alleged to have met her future husband through Epstein.
“I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania and he kept on coming out of the bedroom saying’ wow what a hot piece of a--,’” the unknown sender said.
Melania Trump declared in April that “these images and stories are completely false. I am not a witness or a named witness in connection with any of Epstein's crimes."