Washington:
When Melania Trump addresses the Republican convention from the White House, it will be the most that many Americans have seen of their first lady since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic that has come to define her husband’s administration. Out of the public view for much of the year, Mrs Trump will step into the spotlight Tuesday night to argue for a second term for President Donald Trump — while trying to avoid the missteps that marred her introduction to the nation when she spoke at the gathering in 2016.
The first lady’s office hasn’t provided any hints as to what she will say. “I would suspect that the speech will be a combination of defending what the base likes about Donald Trump, playing up the fact that if you like what you saw, you’ll like the next four years if he’s reelected,” said Ohio University professor Katherine Jellison, who studies first ladies.
Just like Trump has upended norms of the presidency, Melania Trump has altered what it means to be a modern first lady, from continuing to live in New York City in the administration’s opening months to force the ouster of a deputy national security adviser. Not since Nancy Reagan has any first lady asserted herself so publicly in West Wing personnel matters. Like the president, her tenure can also be defined by its ups and downs.
The first lady arranged a splashy launch for “Be Best,” her signature initiative for children, but ended up on the defensive for making anti-cyberbullying one of its pillars when the president regularly uses Twitter to attack anyone he feels has betrayed him. She rushed to the southern border to visit migrant children after the administration started separating them from the grown-ups who brought them to the U.S. from Mexico, a rare instance where she publicly opposed the president’s policy.
But en route to McAllen, Texas, the former fashion model donned a green hooded jacket with “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” scrawled on the back. She didn’t wear it around the children, but the baffling wardrobe choice quickly overshadowed the goodwill border visit. “It distracted from what she was trying to do,” said Myra Gutin, who studies first ladies at Rider University.
The first lady’s spokesperson, Stephanie Grisham, said at the time that it was “just a jacket” with no hidden meaning. President Trump later contradicted that, tweeting that his wife had learned how dishonest the news media are “and she truly no longer cares!” Melania Trump later said in a television interview that the jacket was “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me.” Her announcements during the pandemic of two costly though privately funded White House improvement projects — construction of a tennis pavilion and a Rose Garden renovation — opened her to charges of tone-deafness and a flurry of social media commentary likening her to France’s Marie Antoinette. She tweeted that the naysayers should “contribute something good & productive in their own communities” instead of criticizing her. She responded with silence to claims by porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal that they’d had affairs with Trump, to the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and to Trump’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House for pushing Ukraine to investigate his political opponents. Trump denies the extramarital relationships and was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.
