How Melania Trump’s speech for new US citizens may be used to her husband’s political advantage: report

15 December 2023

2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has promised to "close the border" on his first day in office if he returns to the White House in January 2025. Many of the former president's critics have slammed him as anti-immigrant, but defenders have pointed out that two of Trump's three wives have been immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The late Ivana Trump, his first wife, was born in what is now the Czech Republic and was once communist Czechoslovakia; former First Lady Melania Trump is from Slovenia, which used to be part of the former Yugoslavia. Trump's second wife, Marla Maples, however, was from Cohutta, Georgia roughly 110 miles from Atlanta.

On Friday, December 15, Melania Trump is scheduled to be a guest speaker at a naturalization ceremony for new U.S. citizens — which will be held in the rotunda at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, DC.

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According to Politico's Michael Schaffer, Donald Trump's campaign could use this speech to argue that he isn't anti-immigrant.

"It wouldn't be the first time the Trump political operation has used a citizenship ceremony to his advantage, a chance to soften his image with voters who might see bigotry in his rhetoric about Mexican rapists, or even his more prosaic calls for reducing legal immigration," Schaffer explains. "During the 2020 Republican National Convention, the then-president stood alongside his acting Homeland Security secretary, Chad Wolf, during a naturalization swearing-in at the White House."

Schaffer finds it ironic that Melania Trump is scheduled to speak at the National Archives, as one of the four criminal indictments that her husband is facing has to do with White House documents that the Archives chased after "for two years."

Special counsel Jack Smith alleges that Donald Trump endangered the United States' national security by storing, at Mar-a-Lago, classified White House documents that should have remained in Washington, DC when Trump left the White House on January 20, 2021.

Before it became a criminal case, the National Archives politely asked the former president to please return them. Later, the FBI conducted an investigation; after that, Trump was indicted on federal criminal charges.

"How did it happen that a resident of the same Mar-a-Lago estate whose bathrooms were used to store thousands of allegedly ill-gotten Archives documents won an invite to speak in the same room as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?" Schaffer writes. "For that matter, how is it that a federal agency is giving the spouse of any presidential candidate a star turn in a heart-warming photo-op less than a month before the Iowa Caucuses? The Archives says Trump is there as a result of a personal invitation from Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, a Biden appointee who got to know the then-first lady during a prior stint working with the White House Historical Association."

The Politico reporter adds, "They say Trump was invited in her capacity as a former first lady, not as a candidate's spouse."

A National Archives spokesperson told Politico, "Naturalization ceremonies at the National Archives are not political events, and speakers are not invited in a political capacity."

Politico's full report is available at this link.

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