Melania Trump never stood a chance

Where is Melania? This is the question on everyone’s minds after the former first lady was absent from the afterparty at the Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday night following her husband’s quick trip to New York City. Trolls took to social media to ridicule Mrs. Trump for “not standing by her man” during his indictment; some even cracked jokes that she was moving onto pastures new with freshly single Rupert Murdoch.

Wherever she was, I hope she was happy. In fact, I hope she was positively beaming while horizontal at a spa getting a deep tissue massage with martinis flowing and charging it all to her husband’s credit card. For the life of me, I can’t fathom why any woman would want to stand next to her husband when he’s confirming — or, in Don’s case, denying — that he sleeps with porn stars and pays them hush money. To make matters worse, Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels (if you believe her) happened just one year into their marriage. Their son Barron was born just months before. 

The truth is that Melania Trump can’t win. Since 2015, she has been repeatedly hung out to dry for having the audacity to exist. In her first few months as first lady, she suffered the embarrassment of designers refusing to dress her: Marc Jacobs said he had “no interest” in her wearing his clothes, while Tom Ford claimed “she’s not necessarily my image,” despite her having previously been a model. She’s been called a gold-digger and a Stepford wife. Her clothes are tacky. Her Halloween decorations made headlines for — get this — being too creepy. Poor Melania was even made fun of by the imbecilic Lena Dunham, otherwise known as Satan’s gift to feminism.

Like a bad-mannered mother-in-law, the world wasn’t ready for a cool woman to show up at the family dinner table. That’s the problem with Melania: she was far too cool to be FLOTUS. She never even wanted — or expected — the job, and would have been much happier being on the arm of a successful businessman and holidaying in the Hamptons. She’s cold, reserved, immaculately dressed. She wears six-inch heels to everything — even to the fallout of Hurricane Harvey in Houston. You very rarely know what she’s thinking unless she’s shooting evils at her husband’s one-liners.

Melania’s mistake was to follow in the footsteps of the all-American, fist-pumping sweetheart Michelle Obama. How was Mrs. Trump ever to compete with an educated, attractive, empowered Harvard-educated lawyer who also became the first black FLOTUS? Most importantly, Michelle wore trainers. The sour-faced model with a Slovenian accent was never going to be seen as noble enough to take the baton.

Take Melania’s solo-trip to Africa, which was damage control after her husband called much of the continent a “shithole.” Headlines blasted her for her outfit choices, and during her first solo press conference, she was forced to say, “We just completed an amazing trip. We went to Ghana. We went to Malawi. We went to Kenya. Now here we are in Egypt. I want to talk about my trip and not what I wear.”

Melania has been accused of “not caring” and “selling her soul.” A friend of hers, Stephanie Winston, wrote in her book Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady that “she had no interest in politics before casting her first vote in 2016 and we’re left to assume she voted merely out of personal loyalty.” A bizarre accusation that I’m sure no other first lady in history has been subjected to. But it’s never really mattered what she’s done, or said, or not done. Melania Trump never stood a chance.