A first lady with her own views
In January 1972, news agencies heralded a groundbreaking visit to three African nations by first lady Pat Nixon. The official purpose of her trip was to represent her husband, Richard Nixon, at the inauguration of Liberian President William Tolbert. But she also conferred with Tolbert and other African leaders about U.S. foreign aid, apartheid in South Africa, and the Nixons’ forthcoming trip to China.
“Never before had an American first lady visited Africa, acted as the nation’s official representative at an event of state, or conferred with heads of state on behalf of her husband,” Time magazine declared.
I thought of Pat Nixon as I read about Melania Trump’s four-country tour of Africa last week, which was arguably more historic. To paraphrase Time, never before has an American first lady visited Africa — or anywhere else — on her own behalf, not her husband’s. Easily mocked for her fashion choices, especially the strange jacket she wore to the U.S.-Mexican border, the former model might one day be seen as the woman who broke the model for presidential wives.
At first glance, to be sure, all of Ms. Trump’s African activities fell squarely into the traditions laid down by her predecessors. She visited a clinic in Ghana, where she obligingly kissed a very cute baby. She attended a ceremony to donate textbooks at a school in Malawi. And she fed young elephants in Kenya, another requisite first-lady photo-op.
But here’s the difference: Melania Trump was visiting Africa to promote her own “Be Best” campaign for children’s well-being, not to support President Trump or his policies. Indeed, to some observers, it seemed like she was subverting them.
So in Malawi, where Melania Trump watched the U.S. ambassador present 1.4 million school books courtesy of the Agency for International Development, news accounts noted that the Trump administration had tried — unsuccessfully —to slash USAID’s budget by 30 percent. Critics also highlighted Trump’s recent comments about restricting American aid to countries that are friendly to the United States.
In Kenya, meanwhile, Ms. Trump visited a site where authorities had burned ivory in an effort to curtail its trade. Conservationists were quick to point out that Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke — an avid game hunter, like President Trump’s two sons — recently had lifted a ban on importing elephant trophies to the United States. So here, too, it seemed, Melania Trump was subtly critiquing her husband’s policies.
Perhaps. But the effort to parse Melania Trump’s views of the president — already a favorite D.C. parlor game — negates her real achievement, which has been to move beyond his shadow. Whatever she might think of Donald Trump, Melania Trump made it clear that she wasn’t in Africa to speak for him.
And that makes her different from all of our other first ladies, who dutifully supported their husbands’ international agendas. Rosalynn Carter went on a two-week, 12,000-mile diplomatic trip in 1977 to six Latin American countries and Jamaica, where she promoted Jimmy Carter’s policies on human rights, arms control and drug trafficking. Hillary Clinton led the American delegation to the 1995 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she famously declared that women’s rights were human rights and vice versa.
Laura Bush likewise stressed female empowerment during three trips to Afghanistan; she also attended the inauguration of Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African country. And Michelle Obama visited several countries on behalf girls’ education, dotting her popular Instagram feed with photos of schoolgirls around the world.
But all of these first ladies were serving as official representatives of the president; behind the scenes, meanwhile, they also lobbied their husbands to take up women’s causes. That brought two different — and, in some ways, contradictory — kinds of criticism. Some Americans complained that presidential wives held too much sway over policy, while others worried that they exerted this influence solely by virtue of their marriage to the president. Call it the first lady’s double bind: You’re either the power behind the throne or an appendage to it.
Melania Trump could be the first presidential wife to escape from that trap. President Trump tweeted a note of praise for her, proclaiming that “[o]ur country’s great First Lady, Melania, is doing really well in Africa.” But whatever she’s doing, it’s not for him. She’s on her own.
So she’s also a pioneer, in ways none of us could have predicted. Criticizing Rosalyn Carter’s 1977 Latin America tour, where Ms. Carter simply echoed her husband, columnist Meg Greenfield wondered whether America would ever have a first lady with “a separate set of views and purposes.” Forty years later, we might have found her.