Newly assertive Melania demands adviser thrown out

WASHINGTON: In the White House this week, Trump’s the boss. Melania Trump (pic), that is.

After two years of being American politics’s biggest enigma, the first lady has broken cover with her startling demand to get a senior adviser to the president thrown out.

First ladies often wield power – they have the ear of the president, and more, after all – but they rarely intervene so directly. And never publicly.

So Melania’s demand on Tuesday that deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel step aside gave the White House a shake.

Donald Trump’s entire leadership style is based on him being the centre of attention.

Suddenly, Washington’s focus was on his wife and her declaration that Ricardel “no longer deserves the honour of serving in this White House”.

What would he do?

A little more than 24 hours passed before the answer came: Ricardel was leaving the White House for an unspecified job somewhere else.

“Unprecedented,” NBC television said.

“Extraordinary,” Trump’s favourite Fox News said.

Ricardel wasn’t some minor player. She was deputy to the powerful national security adviser John Bolton.

Her sin? Reportedly rowing with Melania Trump’s staff over seating allocations on the plane taking the first lady on an Africa tour in October, as well as being blamed for negative news coverage.

“It’s not unusual” for a first lady to weigh in on a president’s staff, said Kate Andersen Brower, author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.

She recalled a famous incident when Nancy Reagan got Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff Don Regan axed. But that was done behind the scenes.

“It is unprecedented for a first lady to issue a statement demanding that her husband fire someone. That is jaw dropping,” Brower said.

Melania Trump’s move was notable not just for how high up and how decisively she struck but the timing.

Bolton, one of the most powerful members of Trump’s inner circle, had reportedly been trying to shield his deputy. So Melania Trump waited until Bolton was safely away on a trip in Asia.

Brower calls Melania Trump “pri- vate to the point of being reclusive”.

That has left others to define her, often based on absurdly tiny scraps of information.

Some claim to detect cryptic signals in which she seeks rescue from her marriage. Or that she is primed to rebel against a man who went through two marriages before finding the Slovenian former fashion model 23 years his junior.

This year, Melania Trump began putting some of her own markers down.

Even then, though, confusion reigned.

Her decision to wear a jacket inscribed with the phrase “I really don’t care do U?” while visiting detained immigrants on the Mexican border completely threw the public and media.