The Woman in the High Castle
On November 8th, the night of the US election, someone on Facebook prophetically quipped that Melania Trump wasn’t going to be a problem because she’d be quickly sidelined and replaced in the White House by Ivanka. Two days later, Melania was still in the picture for the first official visit to the White House. Three days after that, she appeared in a pre-taped 60 Minutes interview. Next came the announcement, not from her, but from Trump, that she would be staying in New York City until her son finished his school year.
Even though the Trump Tower lobby is teeming with press, there has been no sign of her. Gone. She has effectively been ‘disappeared’.
Until now.
America loves their festivities and so the ramp up to the January inauguration has begun. This means the prop with a heartbeat will be trotted out again for another victory lap. Of course, the first out of the media gate is the ordinarily apolitical fashion press. Melania needs to be dressed. On December 1, US Weekly began running an unctuous overview of Melania’s life, accomplishments, and ambitions as First Lady (http://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/news/marc-jacobs-more-designers-talk-dressing-melania-trump-w453211). It’s not the slick editing and upbeat music that disturbs; it’s that the all too familiar ‘entertainment news recap’ format, previously reserved for actors and sports figures, is now being applied to something Trumpian. Amusingly, it is imbedded in a story about the clothing designers who will and will not dress her. The value here is to clock the ambassadorial wording of those taking their genitals in their hands and hedging their bets.
Fashion aside, the anguish surrounding First Lady-in-Waiting Melania Trump is only just beginning. It’s a muddy pond alive with fermenting activity, populated by special interest factions: the Alt-Right/Alt-White/Neo-Nazi acolytes frantic to boost Melania’s image with fake news reports about Michelle’s transgressions; Hillary supporters vomiting into their own mouths every time they think of Melania standing in history alongside the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Lady Bird Johnson; feminists decrying the slut-shaming and see her only fault being the man she married; and everyone in between.
To sort this out, consider Melania Trump for what she is, that being the luckiest trophy wife in the western hemisphere. Rightly or wrongly, it’s an easier pill to swallow. After all, she picked the right rich guy at the right time.
What makes this pill jagged is the ‘normalizing’ that’s about to happen. And Melania is going to be the perfect case study of it.
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Melania Trump is far from the first model to marry a politician, even if the man she married wasn’t thinking about being a politician when they met. Trump was a businessman - she was a 28-year old model who, like all models in their 20s, could hear the career clock ticking loudly. Knowing that the industry average for retirement is 21, she was bucking the odds by not having a Plan B in place. 30 was coming at her like a windshield comes up on a bug on the highway.
She would have known Trump had a pattern when it came to marriage: models.
Wife #1: Canadian-turned-American/Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Duration: 14 years. Payout: $14 million cash, an apartment at Trump Plaza, the family’s 45-room Connecticut estate, and access to Mar-a-Lago (Source: Vanity Fair).
Wife #2. Model-turned-actress Marla Maples. Duration: 6 years. Payout: $2 million, property, and child support. Reportedly, Marla would have received more if the divorce happened a few months later, according to the prenup (Source: New York Daily News).
Much of this had been widely publicized in the press in 1998 when Trump first asked for Melania’s phone number. She declined, saying (in a GQ interview), “If I gave him my number, I’m just one of the women he calls.” Instead, she asked for his contact information.
It was shrewd enough to work.
Given the 2016 election day photo of Trump peering over at her as she cast her ballot, the phone number gambit may well have been Melania’s last act of independence.
On the bright side, what with the track record of Trump’s past marriages, winning the US election guarantees Melania has the next four years of marriage locked in because it is unlikely Trump will divorce and find a replacement wife while he is president.
* * *
At first, I genuinely believed that the source of irritation was Melania herself. The mere idea of endless photos of her perfecting the Zoolander Blue Steel look next to world leaders was seismically preposterous.
Digging deeper, I thought my annoyance sourced from the injustice of elevating the ignoble to a noble posting. A limited number of credible media outlets (GQ, Forbes, Hollywood Reporter, New York Post (ok, it’s the Post)) have generated laughable excuses to run the nude photo of Melania on a bearskin rug, but have steadfastly shied away from the more telling shot from 2000 in a mock-up of the Oval Office for the now defunct Talk Magazine.
And then it hit me. Melania is not the problem – she’s just the symptom. It’s the normalizing that’s the problem. The post-truth, to use the newly minted term. It’s absolutely not limited to Melania. It’s having spent the last 15 months watching the American public endure lie after lie, outrage after outrage, and then, when it comes right down to it, a solid 1/4 of the US public ignore it all and vote in favour of Trump.
It’s true what Noam Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent: Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship. The masses of people (80 percent) are marginalized, diverted and controlled by what Chomsky calls Necessary Illusions.
The normalizing will come from expected and unexpected corners. In a recent article, Don Levy, overseer of the ongoing First Ladies Studies at Siena College Research Institute near Albany, NY, said, "I think Melania Trump is going to do very well at that ceremonial role." [Pause for a moment to consider there is actually a study on this subject with categories such as "Could have done more in office; Created lasting legacy; Effectively managed family life while in office."]
At some point, Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine will capitulate and celebrate Melania the way they are currently celebrating Michelle O. Even if they don’t want to, Trump will pressure them into it (although their willingness to get down on their knees and worship before the Kardashians indicates that they are as susceptible to clickbait as anyone else).
Anyone who knows me well knows that studying propaganda is my hobby. For me, everything about Trump is an Orwellian nightmare in the process of happening. By the year 2021, we will believe that 2+2=5, that Melania is a respectable First Lady and that Trump is worthy of the Oval Office.
The problem with Melania is not that she’s a pawn thinking she's Queen. She’s just one of those people who ought to have been more careful about what she wished for because she really got it and now she has to live with it. The problem, and my worry, is that like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the American public will ultimately fall asleep at the wheel of protest, exhausted by fruitless chanting, marching and clever meme posting, only to wake up believing that the pawn is a queen.
