A cipher in sky-high stilettos
NEW YORK: The paparazzi no longer stake her out at her son’s private school or search for her on the streets surrounding the black tower that her husband, the US president, named after himself.
Melania Trump is virtually shut in her Manhattan flat.
“She’s the great white whale,” said Miles Diggs, a paparazzo, as he and his partner hunted celebrities in Soho and were equipped with cameras and a laptop. They were searching for actress Emma Watson, who, unlike Melania, they were confident they could find.
“When it comes to getting people, I don’t miss,” Diggs said. “But Melania has been just so elusive.”
Two months after her husband’s swearing in, the nation’s new first lady approaches her role with a discernible reticence, her paucity of public appearances – each defined by tight smiles and spare verbiage – overshadowed by a vanishing act that stretches days on end.
Yet by retreating to her triplex, where she is said to tend to Barron, the Trumps’ 11-yearold son, the first lady guarantees herself even more attention. An ever-clamorous chorus of gossipmongers, pundits, historians and even body-language experts dissect her every move to unearth a true State of Melania. Good luck.
Melania is a Rorschach test in Louboutins, inspiring praise from those who see in her inscrutable gaze an elegant, dutiful mother charting a new role for the first lady; compassion from those imagining her as the president’s unhappy captive, her penthouseturned-prison costing taxpayers ungodly sums to secure; and contempt from those rendering her as her husband’s chief enabler, abiding his sexist and anti-immigrant bluster and echoing at one time his baseless questioning of former president Barack Obama’s citizenship.
“Melania Trump is as ugly on the inside as she is pretty on the outside” was how Dan Savage, the sex columnist and gay activist, put it in a recent podcast. He flayed “folks on the left” who “view her as some sort of sympathetic figure – the pretty princess in the tower locked up by the orange ogre with the bad comb-over”.
Her handful of appearances have yielded few clues, her smile fixed.
Among the rare moments the first lady has spoken publicly was while reading Dr Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go! this month to children at a Manhattan hospital, her Slovenian accent as obvious as her large diamond ring and sky-high stilettos.
She smiled and seemed receptive when Tara McKelvey, a BBC reporter, approached with a question.
“But the aides came in and swooped her away and had her pose for a picture,” McKelvey said. “She was trying to answer.”
A few days later, Melania hosted a White House luncheon to celebrate International Women’s Day. She was announced and strode to the rostrum. Smiling, she said: “Your excellencies, esteemed represent-…”
Whatever she said next was unknown beyond the dining room because White House aides ordered the media pool to exit.
Karen LeFrak, a friend who attended the White House event said Melania “didn’t do the lunch for publicity” and she “does not seek attention”.
Describing her friend’s adjustment, LeFrak said she was carving out an important role to support women and children and redecorating their residence in the White House, where she would move after Barron completes the school year.
“Mrs Trump is enjoying her life and new role,” wrote LeFrak, the wife of developer Richard LeFrak, a long-time friend of the president.
As for the Trumps’ marriage, LeFrak wrote: “They are very happy! Their relationship is great.”
Deputy White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said on the weekend that the first lady anticipated a “busy upcoming week in DC” and would join the president soon.” She remains “focused on Barron as he finishes the school year,” Grisham said. – Washington Post