When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addressed a national security forum last Wednesday, an event which featured yet another in his never ending series of gaffes, his wife Melania was there too. Nothing remarkable there, of course. It’s traditional and even expected that candidates’ spouses show their active, wholehearted support at every opportunity.
What is remarkable is that Melania was not standing proudly alongside her husband onstage; she was sitting in the audience. To use a soccer analogy, she was on the substitutes’ bench, not in the team. And this was the first time in seven weeks she has even been seen at a Trump event.
The demotion can be clearly traced back to a disastrous night in July, when she gave a speech to the GOP Convention that was evidently lifted – word for word in places – from a speech by Michelle Obama eight years earlier. After only a couple of previous public addresses, this should have been Melania’s triumphant confirmation as a primary, valuable speaker on behalf of Donald. It turned into a fiasco and caused a stink that hung around for days.
Then another commotion erupted over questions regarding her past, including the legality of her entry and work in the U.S. This resulted in threatening letters from her lawyers to Liberal America and others.
One striking aspect of that row was that Melania appears to have lied under oath about her academic qualifications. She made the same assertion about her claimed bachelor’s degree in the biography page of her website, which was promptly taken down as scrutiny intensified.
Even though a tough stance on immigration is a major theme of Trump’s campaign, the Trumps have still failed to supply documentary evidence that her visa and green card were obtained by normal, legal means.
It seems that her glamorous, carefully groomed presence front and center is now perceived by the campaign managers as a liability, not an asset. It’s also interesting that there’s no word from the managers and apparently no plans for her future participation in the run-up to the election.
Her sudden disappearance from public view has sparked satirical Twitter hashtags such as #WhereisMelania. It’s noticeable that her own Twitter feed, which was once all about the high life she enjoys, is now exclusively about her wrangles with the media and the U.S. legal system. Compare and contrast these two tweets, one from last April, one from August 22 – the last time she has tweeted anything at all.
Meanwhile, let’s look back at that plagiarism controversy, and how it was uncovered by freelance journalist Jarrett Hill.
Featured image: Boss Tweed via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
