Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, Sunday Review, Jan. 28, 2018<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON \u2014 Melania has learned a few things from the master.<\/p>\n
The first lady will never be as brilliant at trolling as her husband. He is an idiot-savant who plays in the roiling ocean of Twitter as naturally as a blubbery-necked sea lion.<\/p>\n
Only Donald Trump, a Rat Pack relic who spurred the reckoning with his transgressions toward women, could send out a tweet taking credit for the women\u2019s march.<\/p>\n
But the Slovenian Sphinx has her moments.<\/p>\n
It started when she seemed to sartorially upbraid Trump for his Billy Bush vulgarities by wearing a pussy-bow blouse to the St. Louis debate. Then, in a master stroke, she chose a first-lady project that could only be interpreted as a wicked rip on her husband: fighting vicious cyberbullies. Last spring, Melania\u2019s personal Twitter account favorited a GIF of her own downcast face at the Inaugural Address with an accompanying crack: \u201cSeems the only #Wall @realDonaldTrump\u2019s built is the one between him and @FLOTUS.\u201d<\/p>\n
And who can forget the crisp hand swat in Israel or her wish to spend Christmas on \u201ca deserted island\u201d?<\/p>\n
Last weekend, on the anniversary of the inauguration, Melania Instagrammed a throwback picture of herself in her powder-blue Jackie suit, not with her husband but with a hunky Marine escort. She wore a delighted ear-to-ear smile, the kind she never seems to flash around the Donald. (It would have been even funnier, of course, if she had posted a photo of herself in front of some empty stands and a sparse crowd, but we\u2019re talking more grounds for divorce there.)<\/p>\n
After the Stormy Daniels story broke \u2014 about Trump cavorting and watching Shark Week with the porn star and telling her not to worry about Melania, at home with a new baby, and then having his lawyer allegedly pay Stormy $130,000 during the campaign to hush her up \u2014 a wintry Melania canceled her plan to accompany her husband to Davos.<\/p>\n
Instead, while the kid from Queens was abroad trying to impress the soul-sucking global elites he got elected railing against, pathetically bragging that he had \u201ca crowd like they\u2019ve never had before in Davos,\u201d Melania made a solo visit to the Holocaust Museum here for Holocaust Remembrance Day. This looked like a subtle reproach to Trump for his unspeakable defense of the \u201cvery fine people\u201d among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., and an allusion to the president\u2019s statement last year on remembrance day, which somehow neglected to remember Jews or anti-Semitism. What a Stephen Miller special that was.<\/p>\n
Afterward, the always elusive first lady became even more elusive, slipping out of Washington, much to the surprise of the press. Suddenly, as Stormy Daniels began her media tour on \u201cInside Edition\u201d and booked an appearance on \u201cJimmy Kimmel,\u201d Melania was making a stealthy landing in Florida on an Air Force plane.<\/p>\n
Trump could humiliate his wife by being a big, horny pig, but he is the one who comes off as the embarrassment. He\u2019s an embarrassing husband and an embarrassing president and an embarrassing leader of the free world. Barack Obama was always calling to our better angels. Donald Trump is paying off porn stars and denigrating struggling countries that send minorities to the U.S. as \u201cshitholes.\u201d How did we drop so far and so fast from class to crass?<\/p>\n
Partly, it was the Democrats\u2019 preference for lecturing and entitlement over winning and wooing. They passed over people who had better messages and more authentic personae who might have beaten Trump, like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, and gave the nomination to Hillary Clinton, a flawed feminist icon who was stunted in her ability to criticize her rival for his retrogressive treatment of women since she had enabled her husband in his retrogressive treatment of women.<\/p>\n
The Times reported Friday<\/a> that Hillary protected a senior adviser on faith in her 2008 campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young female aide. Hillary ignored the advice of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, to fire the man, Burns Strider, and simply docked him several weeks of pay and made him undergo counseling. The subordinate who complained was given a new job.<\/p>\n As The Times\u2019s Susan Chira wrote<\/a>, the episode was \u201ca poignant reminder that placing women in positions of leadership does not ensure they will always act to protect other women.\u201d<\/p>\n