The Weekly Screed (#860)

Melania’s make-believe
(almost) happy ending
by David Benjamin

“The White House said that, instead of plagiarising the text, she had simply ‘added branding’ to the original content, to ‘amplify’ its message.”
— Harriet Alexander, The Telegraph

MADISON, Wis. — This is just not fair. Let’s stop right now with jokes about how the First Lady’s name sounds like a mutant STD that combines melanoma and gonorrhea.

That’s is a mean thing to say, and you people should stop right now!

The same goes double for this plagiarism hangup. After Melania launched her pro-children campaign this week, the liberal media started busting her (perfectly formed, beautiful) chops — again! — because she accidentally lifted every single word in her media materials from an FTC brochure composed by the Obama administration. The fact-check vultures of the fake-news media couldn’t resist reminding us that Melania had cribbed her Republican Convention speech from a previous address by her mortal enemy, Michelle Obama.

Okay, maybe Melania did a little copying. But call it “homage” and fuggedaboudit. Melania’s (perfectly formed, beautiful) body might be in the wrong place — the White House — but her heart is not. She might not want to serve as the public face of a Rose Garden program for needy children (or the public face of anything), but she really does care about kids.

Actually, the only emotion evident in Melania, who’s largely a (perfectly formed, beautiful) enigma is her concern for children. This compassion probably derives from love for her son — unfortunately named Barron (certainly not her idea). This kid needs his mom’s advocacy. Many observers have rather reluctantly noted that Barron presents an odd, aloof affect. They fear that he might have a developmental issue, possibly a form of autism.

Anyone who has seen Trump’s youngest son in his rare, awkward public moments can’t help but feel for him. Here’s a kid who appears to need some sort of special help, and he has a mother who, desperately, wants to seize whatever care he requires. But the kid is trapped in denial of even the tiniest flaw by a father whose monstrous machismo cannot suffer any admission that his children fall anywhere short of tremendousness.

If a Trump child is not tremendous, the solution is not to help him, but to hide him. Or her (cf., Tiffany).

Which is okay. For their own sake, presidential kids — even the occasionally tremendous one — ought to be hidden, at least ’til they’re grown up.

But so should Melania — and not just because every time she opens her (perfectly formed, beautiful) mouth, she ends up unwittingly channeling Michelle. Melania deserves a nice hiding place because she clearly did not sign up for the humiliation that has become a) her marriage and b) her First Ladyship.

All she ever really wanted was a rich, old, unhealthy American whom she could outlive.

According to witnesses who were present, Melania burst into tears on Election Night when she realized she was going to be First Lady.  In every appearance since then, she conveys the sense that she doesn’t want the job. Just as obviously, her husband doesn’t want her there. He’d rather trot out Ivanka — who speaks better English and has bigger tits.

I think if Melania had her druthers, she’d slink off to Trump Tower — or better yet, Turnberry, the Trump county club in Scotland. I picture her there, nurturing Barron sumptuously on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime. The kid has a governess and a tutor, a therapist, a physical trainer and maybe — just for fun — a bagpipe instructor.

I can even picture the happy ending. I see a strapping young Barron, fit and confident, a few years from now. He’s wearing a kilt, squeezing his bagpipes and playing “Amazing Grace” at his dad’s burial. An ironic smile plays across his lips.

Melania would miss neither the White House nor its current master. More and more, it’s clear that she’s repelled — remember the video clip in which she slaps away Trump’s attempt to hold her hand — by her bloated spouse and appalled by his vanity. (She’s the beautiful one, he thinks he is.)

Installed far from Washington with her son, Melania could still serve the White House remotely by attending, for instance, the many funerals, celebrations, premiers, dinners, ceremonies, weddings and coronations where her husband would be pointedly unwelcome. As a goodwill ambassadress, she would be gorgeous and graceful, unfettered and visibly happy, smiling naturally rather than wearing the rictus grin that she works up grudgingly when she stands beside her faithless, Stormy-chasing hubby.

Eerily, this misbegotten first couple was prefigured by a 1993 movie called Dave. In the film, a selfish, corrupt president suffers a stroke and — by pure cinema happenstance — he’s replaced by an amiable nobody, played charmingly by Kevin Kline. Until his mid-debauch stroke sends the president into a coma, the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver), has been planning to divorce the satyric son of a bitch the very minute that his term in office ends. The happy ending here, of course, is that the First Lady falls in love with her husband’s kind, clever alter ego.

Transferred to real life, the plot devices of Dave — a stroke, a coma, a lingering death — would probably be Melania’s (perfectly formed, beautiful) happy ending. Except for one hitch. In the movie, the president’s double looked like Kevin Kline.

In Melania’s version, the lookalike Trump, even if he’s nice, would still look like Trump.