Melania's Rebellion
I now believe that Melania Trump is openly rebelling against her wayward husband's misguided sentiments, policies, and practices. Here is my carefully crafted analysis of Melania's remarkable gambit to lead a rebellion against the President.
After studying and evaluating all the evidence, I conclude the controversial Zara jacket was a brilliant gambit that utterly blindsided Mr. Trump. Let me carefully walk you through my analysis and reasoning since it's by no means obvious how to make sense of it all.
This story was frankly a challenging one to parse. After researching it for the better part of a week, I finally arrived at the best surviving hypothesis that remains consistent with the known facts. So here, without further introduction, is my concise explanation of the Zara jacket, as I first publicly posted it on the YouTube Comments on Stephen Colbert's monologue about Melania's Zara jacket.
Given that both Ivanka and Melania reportedly lobbied Mr. Trump to revoke his family separations policy, I doubted the sentiment expressed on the back of the Zara jacket was hers. Let me explain.
I can imagine Mr. Trump having said something like that to Ivanka or Melania on multiple occasions in the past. If so, Melania may have acquired (or borrowed) the Zara jacket to remind her husband of his heartlessness when she finally had an opportunity to take a direct action of her own in response to such a mocking question from him.
And here is the evidence for that: The night before, in Duluth, Mr. Trump repeated the phrase "We Don't Care" in a mocking call and response chant to his base.
It occurs to me that Melania intentionally wore that jacket because it quotes what Trump said at his Duluth rally the previous night. She threw his heartless words back at him and then personally and publicly acted to demonstrably repudiate his manifestly heartless sentiment.
Jesus famously said to one of his own disciples, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Melania was literally putting her husband's unbecoming remarks behind her, as she headed off to demonstrate her genuine concern and compassion. And note that she donned the jacket a second time as she returned to the White House. But she did not wear it in Texas, only in Washington DC.
When Melania met with some of the migrant teenage children in Texas, she expressly called them "kind" thereby refuting Trump's absurd and oft-repeated claim the Latino youth were illegally crossing the border to become MS 13.
That's the initial evidence upon which I rest my case.
I've laid out my own preferred working hypothesis at the outset. Now I await future evidence to affirm or falsify any or all of the numerous and varied alternative narratives on the airwaves.
And I'll give you dollars to donuts, the ridiculous narrative explanation DJT tweeted is the polar opposite of the ground truth.
Now on to my bottom line:
Melania brilliantly revealed and branded her husband's heartless demeanor. Moreover, there is nothing he can do about it. He can't fire her.
Moreover, she has beaten him at his own puerile and tiresome game of branding others.
When the dust has settled, I anticipate that Melania's remarkable gambit will be seen as an unanticipated and heroic turning point in the fortunes of her husband's manifestly heartless administration.
More details here: https://www.facebook.com/bkort/posts/10156520772776967
But wait! There's more!
Melania has been systematically signaling her opposition to and rejection of her wayward husband's sentiments, policies, and practices for at least the past three years. By my estimation, I count at least a dozen such subtle (yet unmistakable) messages in an increasingly clear and emergent pattern. Most of them were far enough below radar that few people took much notice of them at the time. The Zara jacket gambit was enough above radar to draw me to begin undertaking a comprehensive review of them.
Just as Trump boorishly tries to undermine his adversaries on a tiresome daily basis, Melania has been exclusively targeting her own husband at the average rate of one subtle message roughly every three months.
On the question of whether or not Melania adores or despise her spouse, the evidence for that systematically and consistently goes the other way. Again, it's subtle but telling. For example, on Twitter, Melania has the @FLOTUS account. Her account has but six others that she follows. Take a look at the first two of the other Twitter accounts she follows.
Here's another example. There are two kinds of smiles:
1) a forced smile and
2) a Duchenne smile.
Here is a rare shot of Melania displaying a Duchenne smile.
I won't belabor them here, but there is a string such of under-the-radar shots of Melania barely tolerating her husband's presence while demonstrating her preference and admiration for the sentiments and company of those whom her husband routinely disparages.
This is a little bit like the children's fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. But Melania is not playing the role of the child who brashly blurts out the observation of the Emperor's nakedness. Instead, she is winking the message in a way that maximizes the public's gradual (but inevitable) awareness of what she has known about him for more than a decade.
If the shenanigans in the White House are seen as a shreklisch soap opera, Melania has the better brand of soap. Inside the inner circle of the White House, Melania has taken the leadership role in slaying the dragon in the Oval Office.
By the way, there is another datum to consider. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, Trump and his defenders dismissed it as "locker room talk." Melania was later asked about it and she called it "boy talk." Now superficially that sounds like a synonym for "locker room talk" but is it? Melania characterized her husband's behavior as juvenile, an assessment that became a recurring cartoon meme in the trope of "Baby Trump."
See also what the late Charles Krauthammer said about Trump.
Getting back to the arrival rate of evidence, for most of the first three years since Trump became a candidate, Melania's oppositional messages were coming in at an average rate of one (fairly subtle) message every three months. Now it's closer to one every three weeks.
And they're not so subtle anymore. Trevor Noah reviews the most recent ones.
When it comes to openly rebelling against Mr. Trump, Melania is way ahead of Ivanka and everyone else in Trump's inner circle.