Why poor Melania can’t win
‘ICOULD say that I’m the most bullied person in the world,” Melania Trump said during her recent tour of Africa. “One of them — if you really see what people are saying about me.”
Twitterworld scoffed. But while her poll numbers are always the highest among the Trump clan, it is true that the coastal culturati and the press judge and label her. Almost everything she tries as FLOTUS falls flat.
Last year’s elaborate Christmas decorations, a personally selected White House silvery forest, drew comparisons to a Tim Burton movie set. Her “Be Best” help-the-children campaign has been panned as an aimless p.r. stunt plagiarizing the name of a project begun under Michelle Obama.
Last week, critics heaped scorn on her white pith helmet in Africa (tone-deaf about imperialist history!) and the white suit and fedora she wore (the ghost of Michael Jackson!) in Giza.
In her ABC interview, she blamed the “left-wing press” for her infamous decision to sport an “I Don’t Care Do U” Zara jacket to visit separated families at the border. True, progressives and “the left-wing” media don’t like her. But is that really fair, given her past?
Melania grew up in a working class town in Slovenia in a small apartment with her dad, Viktor Knavs, a tough and a gearhead who ruled over his wife and two daughters, who formed a tight protective triad that exists to this day.
In high school, she doodled fashions and eyed cute boys on Vespas, without much interest in the outside world. The proctor who administered what he said was her first and last test at the school of architecture at the University of Ljubljana recalled “a bomb” in “jeans from Paris” and only secondly how she froze up when asked to draw and soon after left the school.
She entered the modeling industry during a decade when Slavic women, from Moscow to the steppe, were being hyper-sexualized. In this milieu, Melania’s beauty — marketed through modeling — was a boon for her family but also a curse for her. She doesn’t like attention or, especially, criticism.
The photographer who discovered her when she was a teen noticed a stiffness and an unease with exposure, a discomfort that she’s never shed, despite 20 years submitting to being photographed clothed and unclothed.
She met Trump in the 1990s, as the Manhattan modeling market was oversupplied with Slavic beauties fleeing the newly liberated communist countries.
At 27, she was already aging out of the mercilessly youth-oriented industry and was happy to hand over her career to The Donald, a middle-aged modelizer who had perfected the role of Pygmalion.
She went along with the campaign, a beautiful, silent counterpoint to her husband.
When he got elected, she stepped gingerly into the role and every gaffe was recorded. Of course she can dress the part, but nothing she learned as a girl growing up in a shoe-factory town deep in the Slavic forest or cloistered in Trumpworld as a wife and mother prepared her to host White House dinners or craft an image of herself to win over political reporters.
The trip to Africa was only a temporary escape. Even there, she couldn’t get away from the sound of snickers at her unusual fashion choices and accusations of tone-deafness about ugly symbols of colonialism.
In her eyes, Melania is being treated unfairly. And in a sense, that is true. To some extent, all presidential wives are unfairly scrutinized, and she — least prepared of all — must feel the slings and arrows more than most.