A shared but unwelcome bond
Hillary Clinton, Melania Trump battle scandal.
Neither would relish the comparison, but it’s hard to avoid noticing that first lady Melania Trump is in a similar unenviable position former first lady Hillary Clinton was in the 1990s: standing by husbands accused of sexual misconduct.
“Melania shares this humiliation with Hillary Clinton and no other first lady, not because their husbands weren’t cheating on them (see Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy) but because the media no longer considers these matters private,” says Kate Andersen Brower, a commentator and author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.
So how do these two women compare in their reactions? Not the same. Not even close.
“Melania Trump is a private person and Hillary Clinton was an exceedingly public person who approached the position of first lady in an unprecedented way, with a West Wing office and taking on health care reform,” Andersen Brower says. “Hillary lashed out at critics and people accusing her husband of cheating. Melania Trump has not said anything publicly and was hunkered down at Mar-a-Lago.”
“These are two different ladies: One is a political persona, and Melania Trump is far from that,” adds Washington trial attorney Joseph Cammarata, who helped press a lawsuit against President Clinton in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court decision that now leaves all presidents, including Trump, vulnerable to similar lawsuits. “She is a woman of grace, and she is keeping her own counsel and privacy.”
Don’t hold your breath on whether Melania Trump comments on her marriage, says historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of America’s First Families: An Inside View of 200 Years of Private Life in the White House.
“There are lots of clues and suppositions people are trying to draw from clues, but the reality is we will never know the truth until she speaks,” Anthony says. “Her thinking may be that no matter what people are saying about you, if you address that, it is only going to create 10 times more criticism or speculation.”
Hillary Clinton was 45 when Bill Clinton took office in 1993, a Yale-trained lawyer, a Democrat and a liberal. Melania Trump is 47, a former fashion model, an immigrant from Slovenia and (presumably) a Republican and a conservative. Clinton was an activist first lady; Trump has been significantly less so in public. The two have met at least once: The Clintons attended the Trumps’ wedding at Mar-a-Lago in January 2005.
Yet both first ladies have faced the embarrassment of seeing women come forward to accuse the president of sexual harassment or an affair. Both have been under withering scrutiny of the media as they accompanied their husbands here and there — or not. Both their camps have railed against the accusers: Clinton famously declared they were the product of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” President Trump and his press secretary say Trump’s accusers are liars.
And both women have tried to communicate that they are above the fray, that the scandals mean nothing, that they would keep calm and carry on, that they were standing by their man.
Neither could look to past first ladies for guidance: President Kennedy and President Franklin Roosevelt, not to mention President Harding, were philanderers and their wives knew it, as did some of the Washington press corps at the time. But no one told the public.
“Of course many people think there should be a distinction between personal and professional ethics, but the general consensus seems to be that this is fair game” now, Andersen Brower says.
And in just one ironic twist, it is a result of the Clintons’ legal woes that the Trumps find themselves unlikely to escape civil lawsuits filed by three women — adult film star Stephanie Clifford (who used the stage name Stormy Daniels), former Playboy model Karen McDougal and former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos — against President Trump.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1997 that a private citizen — former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones — could sue a sitting president — Bill Clinton. Jones said Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, sexually harassed her in 1991; he denied it and argued he couldn’t be sued while he was president. The high court said he was wrong.
In the end, Jones’ case was dismissed, she appealed and then settled out of court for $850,000. The consequences for Clinton eventually led to further revelations about his affair with a White House intern and his impeachment by the House in 1998 on charges that included lying under oath.
Now the Trumps face three such potential legal minefields and a vastly changed, even more toxic media environment that includes Twitter and other social media platforms.
In the past week, millions of viewers watched TV’s Anderson Cooper interview both McDougal (on CNN) and Clifford (on CBS’ 60 Minutes) about their claims they had trysts or affairs with Donald Trump around the time Melania Trump gave birth to their 12-year-old son, Barron.
The White House said Monday that President Trump doesn’t believe any of Clifford’s claims, including that she was physically threatened to keep silent about what she said was her one-timeonly fling with Trump in 2006.
“There’s nothing to corroborate her claim,” White House spokesman Raj Shah told reporters.
Did the Trumps watch either interview? No one is saying, but they spent that previous Sunday night apart. The president returned to the White House; the first lady and their son, as planned, remained in Mar-a-Lago where they traditionally spend spring break, said her spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham.
“She’s focused on being a mom and is quite enjoying spring break at Mar-a-Lago and focusing on future projects,” Grisham said in an email to USA TODAY. The annual White House Easter Egg Roll, featuring both Trumps, takes place as scheduled on Monday.
But inevitably the first lady’s actions can be — and are being — interpreted to suit, just as they were for Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s.
When the Stormy Daniels allegations first emerged in January, Melania Trump dropped plans to accompany her husband on a foreign trip and went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum instead, then flew off to Mar-a-Lago for a quick trip to the spa.
For the State of the Union speech in February, she declined to accompany him on the traditional ride to the Capitol and instead took a separate car to honor her guests by escorting them herself. At least twice in recent months, she went by separate car to Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland to board Air Force One; once she even boarded by a separate door from her husband.
On the other hand, last week she stumbled on the way across the White House lawn to Marine One and the president caught her, wrapping his arm around her. During last week’s snow day in Washington, she posted one of her rare tweets, a picture of her and her husband on the Truman Balcony.
On Friday, a day after the McDougal interview and during a State Department ceremony to honor international women of courage (first ladies typically hand out the awards) Melania Trump spoke about courage — what it is and why the world needs it.
Reporters and commentators analyze these episodes carefully, probing for meaning and significance. Meanwhile, she says nothing, and Grisham issues occasional statements suggesting, “Nothing to see here, move along.”
But it’s fair to wonder how much of this sort of sordid gossip she can take. Here again is another thing she has in common with Hillary Clinton, according to Melania herself: She’s no pushover.
After all, she is Trump’s Wife #3 and is aware he cheated on Wife #1 and Wife #2. He has a history of boasting about his conquests and the beautiful women he has dated. Plus, there’s the Access Hollywood audio that emerged during the end of the campaign, the one in which he is heard bragging about how he can grab women’s genitals without repercussions. At the time, Melania Trump made clear how distasteful she found his remarks but she ultimately dismissed them as “boys’ talk.”
“She can take a lot, and none of this should come as a surprise to her,” says Andersen Brower. “I think the difference is that now it’s for public consumption, and before it wasn’t as public. No one would know or care about Stormy if Trump was not the president.”
Andersen Brower cites Melania Trump’s 2016 “I have thick skin” interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. By that point in the campaign, Melania Trump said, “a lot of lies” had been written about her by people who didn’t know her. “I know the truth. And I have a thick skin. ... When he decided that he would run and we went into it ... I know that will be the case that people will write untrue stuff and not even checking the facts.
“So I have a thick skin. I’m strong. I’m standing on my two feet, very strong. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just out there that people maybe they will believe it’s true and it’s not.”