photo credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
It's Friday morning and Melania's jacket is still a thing. At the New York Times, in a story headlined "Melania Trump, Agent of Coat Chaos:"
“I
REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”
When
the first lady, Melania Trump, on a surprise humanitarian visit to a
children’s shelter in Texas, strode onto her airplane in an olive green Zara
army jacket with those words scrawled in faux white graffiti on the back, it
sent the watching world into what might be called, with some understatement, a
meltdown.
“Insensitive,”
“heartless” and “unthinking” were some of the words hurled through the
digisphere about the choice.
“It’s
a jacket,” her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement
to reporters. “There was no hidden message.”
She’s
right, of course. It wasn’t hidden. It was literally written on the first
lady’s back. The question is: Who was the intended audience? (Read the story here.)
Who was the intended audience? All of us, apparently. The president sent out a tweet (yesterday afternoon) contradicting Ms Grisham and claiming Melania was referring to the media:
Later, a "Republican close to the White House" contradicted that, leaking to CNN that "blame it on the media" was a plan drawn up in an "urgent meeting" in response to the unfolding PR disaster:
...a Republican close to the White House sent along a note to say that [the president's] explanation of the coat is "revisionist history."
This
Republican, who is supportive of Trump, but skeptical of some of what they consider
to be the administration's ham-handedness, says there was an urgent meeting
among communications staff about how to fix this after it was becoming a story.
It's
unclear who, exactly, first had the idea to say her coat's message was directed
at the media. But it quickly won approval in the West Wing and by the
President.
This
Republican is citing conversations with people in West Wing who "were
proud of themselves" for coming up with the explanation. It is true that
they knew the media would overplay it, so that's why they devised it. (Read the story here.)
Victoria Arbiter, CNN's royal correspondent, weighed in with this:
Her father, Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to Her Majesty The Queen, piled on, calling it a class issue:
Finally (or maybe not,) there's this:
Whatever it is that Melania was trying to accomplish I'd say that it didn't work. Yes, people are talking about the jacket and trying to decode the message, but it's also a big distraction from what was presumably the point of her trip in the first place, which was to demonstrate that she does care. Was the distraction itself the point? Possibly.
I agree with observers who say there's no way this was a coincidence. In my post about this yesterday (below) I pondered the possibility that the problem was Melania's staff, who weren't savvy enough to advise her that the jacket wasn't appropriate, but that doesn't really ring true. This First Lady is meticulously precise with everything she wears and her clothes are almost always exorbitantly expensive. A $39 jacket with graffiti on the back? You bet she was sending a message and it wasn't "Be Best." (Note that in the picture at the top of this post, after removing the jacket while she was in Texas, Melania pointedly put it back on when she returned to the White House, and that was after the jacket story started blowing up Twitter.) The problem is that unless she tells us, we don't know what the message is. Without that the whole thing is just a stunt, and frankly, a tacky one.
Saturday morning update: In an article titled "Why didn't someone stop Melania Trump from wearing that jacket? That's not how this White House works" the Washington Post provides some "inside baseball" about first ladies and their staffs:
A day after first
lady Melania Trump stirred controversy by wearing a jacket that read “I really
don’t care, do u?” on a trip to visit a children’s shelter on the U.S.-Mexico
border, people are still scratching their heads.
What did it mean? And how did something like this happen?
On his late-night show, comedian Stephen Colbert
asked a version of the question reverberating around political Washington:
“How many people would get fired for this at a normal White House? One? Five?
The entire executive branch? . . . People who were
supposedly on her side let her get on a plane with a jacket that said, ‘I
really don’t care, do you?’”
Whether the first lady anticipated — or was warned — that her
outerwear would divert attention from what her staff described as a
humanitarian mission, her choice to wear it in public seems to be deliberate.
…And she often selects her clothing without assistance,
relying less on stylists and personal shoppers than on her own taste. Her
spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, told The Washington Post’s fashion critic, Robin
Givhan, in December that the first lady “chooses
what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion. She does not worry
about her critics.”
…Anita McBride, who
served as chief of staff to Laura Bush, described the interactions between
political aides and their “principals” as a “delicate dance.”
“She might have really wanted to wear it and was stubborn about
it. Maybe her staff did say something. We don’t know,” McBride said. “But when
you are putting together a trip like this, they have to know that anything they
do and say and wear is going to send a message.”
…One former White House aide who worked with top officials
in both the Obama and Clinton administrations noted that the fact that cameras
captured Mrs. Trump boarding the plane at all was unusual. When the first lady
travels alone from Washington, her tarmac arrival is traditionally closed to
the media, so the decision to allow Mrs. Trump to be photographed seemed
deliberate. (Read the story here.)
Update #2 on July 8: Several members of the Kennedy family trolled Melania while marching in the Hyannis Port 4th of July parade:
Pictured above are Noah Kennedy, daughter of Max Kennedy, and Mariah Kennedy Cuomo, the daughter of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and his ex-wife Kerry Kennedy. Matriarch Ethel Kennedy was trolling too, shown below with her son Max and his wife Victoria:
