STOP BEING SO MEAN TO MELANIA!
Critics back home sneer she’s icy and remote. But as she dazzles in London, one new admirer says...
WATChING the U.S. First Lady as she glides through her visit to Britain with the effortless poise of a supermodel, there’s one question I keep asking myself: why is everyone so mean to Melania?
Whether she’s towering over the Royal Family in a perfectly fitted white dress, commemorating D-Day in flawless cream, or gliding down the gilded corridors of Buckingham Palace in floorsweeping haute couture, there’s no denying her statuesque figure draws the eye.
Yet while fashion critics may take delight in her outfits, commentators don’t seem to have a good word to say about her. Too frosty, too disengaged — too tardy in setting the world’s evils to rights.
She was ridiculed for wearing stilettos en route to a disaster zone after hurricane harvey (despite changing before arrival into trainers), and branded ‘tone deaf’ after she used her Thanksgiving message to say we should ‘keep those who can’t be with their families in our thoughts’ in the wake of immigrant children being separated from their families at the U.S. border.
Yesterday, one piece referred to her as ‘the queen hornet’.
Social media is in uproar over her every move, no matter how innocuous. She wore a Dolce & Gabbana dress on Monday, and was promptly accused of endorsing a brand whose designers courted controversy when it was revealed in a 2015 interview that they opposed gay adoption, with Domenico Dolce adding that he considered children born via IVF to be ‘synthetic’.
If this was the way all First Ladies were treated, I wouldn’t think to mention it.
Yet in past decades we’ve been as fond, if not fonder, of these formidable women as their spouses. We raved over Michelle Obama’s toned arms and social campaigns, applauded Barbara Bush’s steeliness. But Melania? Nada. Is it her aloofness, her seeming lack of enthusiasm, that is behind our failure to warm to her? It’s true she often looks bored — miserable, even.
But pay attention and you’ll see that as she chats to various dignitaries, her severe demeanour relaxes enough to allow a surprisingly sweet smile that makes her appear at least a decade younger than her 49 years.
As for allegations that she’s failed to play her part, as this visit demonstrates she’s never shied away from her duties, even when it means standing in a chilly Westminster Abbey in towering heels for hours on end.
She didn’t ask for this role, remember, having married The Donald when he was no more than a real estate magnate.
Of all the political bigwigs involved in the state visit this week, she’s the one who could least be accused of bringing criticism on herself by seeking the spotlight.
Of course, all this rather skirts the real reason that — wardrobe choices aside — no one seems to think she can do anything right.
That, of course, is her husband. A brash, even hostile figure, whose election has sent Lefties and Liberals around the world into a tailspin, Trump’ s personality colours everything his wife does.
PUNDITS and so-called feminists automatically assume that only a woman with little or no substance could be the wife of so bombastic a man. From the outset, she was dismissed as an ornamental figure.
Instead, Trump’s sparky daughter Ivanka was seized upon as the woman in the White house with something noteworthy to say. And yet she hasn’t proved to be the power behind the throne she was rumoured to be.
even a cursory look at Melania’s upbringing shows she’s no airhead. hers, after all, is a true Cinderella rags-to-riches story. Brought up in Slovenia, she studied architecture then modelled in Paris and Milan before moving to New York in her 20s.
her travels mean that as well as english and her native Slovene, Melania speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French (a tally that puts most First Ladies, and, indeed, most presidents, to shame).
having grown up under Communism, it should be no surprise if she finds it hard to
exude the same easy lightness that many Western women do.
It’s also unfair to claim she has failed to take up the altruistic mantle of her predecessors. True, her initiatives haven’t always been well- judged — think speaking out against cyberbullying when your husband is world famous for his nasty, foulmouthed Twitter rants.
But this non-political woman has been on a solo charity trip to Africa, and launched the Be Best initiative which aims to boost healthy living among children.
I think the real problem is that her detractors expect her to bring her husband into line — especially on issues such as immigration, which many think ought to be close to her heart as a firstgeneration American.
Well, frankly, how sexist is that? A wife is more than a passive foil, standing by to soften the parts of her husband’s personality that some observers find offensive.
And if the threat of nuclear armageddon can’t control Mr Trump, it’s hard to see how his wife could.
She gave us a telling glimpse into their marriage when she revealed that during the presidential campaign she ‘rebuked him all the time’ over his use of social media, but that ‘he will do what he wants to do in the end’. If you marry that kind of man you generally have to fall in line, bury your own wants.
Melania strikes me as quite an unpretentious woman with a surprising lack of vanity, and one who (thank goodness) doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the term ‘virtue signalling’.
True, she’s yet to embark on a one-woman crusade to make the world a better place, in the same vein as Amal Clooney and the Duchess of Sussex. And she’s never going to redeem her husband in the eyes of his critics. But it’s time we judged Melania on her own terms.