Bizarre mystery of Melania’s jacket faux pas

For someone who has been involved in the fashion industry, the US first lady can be surprisingly careless about her public image at times

It was the jacket that launched a thousand tweets. Boarding Air Force One on her way back from visiting a Texas detention centre, where unaccompanied children of the current immigration debate are housed, United States first lady Melania Trump wore a jacket that had “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” emblazoned on the back. Many speculated, as they have of Melania’s fashion choices in the past, whether the jacket was meant to send a subliminal message.

Could it have been a coded allusion to her contempt for her husband? Was it, as the president himself claimed on Twitter, an attempt to tell off the media?

My sense is that it was neither, and that it wasn’t saying anything else either. More likely, it was, as her spokesperson claimed, just a jacket, but that makes it all the more questionable.

To chalk up Melania’s sartorial misstep to an inconsequential oversight would also be misguided. What first ladies do and say in public, as my research on presidential spouses consistently shows, matters very much. Spouses are the most effective public messengers presidential administrations have, and Melania is no exception to this.

Like past first ladies, she is more popular than the president, and she seems to have a greater ability to influence public opinion of her husband among political independents and members of the opposite party, even when compared to key surrogates like President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Vice-President Mike Pence.

But these advantages also impose great responsibility. Melania’s visit to the border on Thursday was the best shot the administration had at putting a compassionate face on a highly divisive and controversial policy. It also fit nicely with Melania’s personal story as an immigrant and her expressed interest in the well-being of children, which she formalised with her platform “Be Best”. Cohesiveness in political communications is everything.

And that is what made jacket-gate such an unfortunate, frustrating and avoidable stumble. When most first ladies make a public gaffe, they tighten up their operation, become more willing to be managed by staff, and make sure not to make the same mistake again.

That is exactly what we saw after Michelle Obama remarked that she was “proud” of her country for the first time in her adult life on the 2008 campaign trail, for example. But Melania has made mistakes aplenty, starting with one too big to even be called a gaffe, the plagiarism scandal that surrounded her remarks at the Republican National Committee in 2016.

In the modern era, the East Wing has developed into an intensely strategic and media-conscious operation that serves to garner positive press coverage for the president. But Melania’s East Wing has not yet hit its stride in this regard, despite its abundant potential to do so. Under the current administration, the West Wing’s communications have, of course, been similarly clumsy, but as history teaches, the first ladies and their staff typically have the opportunity to be better.