Where is Melania?

AW Admin said:

People are asking Where's Melania?

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Fingers said:

Listening to NPR and it said she tweeted(?) that she was fine and dandy and working hard in the white house for children etc... I too am pretty uncomfortable with assuming that he beat her. She just had surgery on her kidney, and while they say it was a minor thing, invasive surgery is never a minor thing. Making assumptions without any evidence to support it like that shouldn't be done.

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Twick said:

It's dawned on a lot of people that the First Lady is MIA.

Now, when she first went into hospital, it didn't seem too suspicious. Illnesses can come up suddenly and it's not necessary for the First Lady to share all the gory details of, say, a colonscopy. But she spent a long time in hospital, and hasn't been seen in public since her discharge.

To give things a creepy tone (which he excels at), when Trump was asked on the White House grounds where she was, he pointed to a window and claimed she was looking out at them. Reporters believe the window was empty - at least no sight of Melania.

Various theories have come up. The most obvious one is that she's had it with Trump, with the Stormy Daniels situation, with a life she never wanted, and has gone back to live in New York, leaving Trump to come up with his own explanation for where she is. A more sinister one is that she received a beating at his hands (he surely would have been furious at her public friendliness with the Obamas). The "playing it day by day" sense that reporters are getting about her next appearance could well be because White House staff don't know exactly when she'll be presentable in public, let alone whether they can rely on her not to let that cat out of the bag.

I hate to be a conspiracy monger, but this whole thing feels odd. If it where Michelle Obama or one of the Bushes, I'd write it off as just a medical issue that lasted longer than expected. For Trump? The weirdest explanation is the most likely.

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AW Admin said:

I'm a little uncomfortable about this topic, in part because when abused people are noticed by others, they tend to receive more abuse.

But I'm also aware that not saying something when potential abuse is suspected can allow the abuser to continue harming the victim(s).

And #45 has a history of psychological-social[/URL and [URL="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-history-of-sex-and-abuse-in-the-trump-administration-w516979"]physical abuse.

With his history of abusing women I too wonder where she is, and if she's ok.

People are asking Where's Melania?

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Political chitchat repeats itself as reliably as history, so it was no surprise this week when online observers began, as they do every few months, to praise Melania Trump. The urge to cast Trump as some sort of “resistance” hero shows how desperate we are to see our own opinions reflected in someone so close to the president. At the same time, it lays bare our longing for the sort of first lady we’ve always felt entitled to.


The latest round of first lady fervor revolved around the administration’s inaugural state dinner, and it started with her hat. From there, the compliments multiplied. Her gown was glorious, her menu high-minded and, in a video that went viral, her refusal to hold her husband’s hand a symbol of rebellion. At least, that’s what her admirers had to say about it: The reaction provoked a split along the left side of the spectrum, with skeptics imploring progressives to stop glorifying presidential co-conspirators for meaningless gestures of independence.


Progressives have long projected our own assessments of President Trump onto anyone on the right who displays the slightest sign of dissent. But in Melania Trump’s case, the compulsion has an added dimension. Two narratives compete for our approval: In one, she is a prisoner in her own home, full of hate for her husband but powerless to do anything about it. In another, she’s still a prisoner — but she’s carrying out her own little “Shawshank Redemption,” getting the better of the commander in chief from the inside.

It’s no wonder, as Donald Trump’s tenure drags on, that we’re drawn more and more to the second narrative. Eager not to appear as if Trump has beaten us down, we want Melania Trump to display defiance along with us. Besides, we derive extra enjoyment from imagining the utter emasculation of a president whose own wife is scoffing at him behind the scenes. And because viewing her as a damsel in well-dressed distress stinks of sexism, looking at her as an undercover ally to the anti-Trump camp seems the preferred alternative, especially now that liberals have abandoned hope that Ivanka Trump would serve as their agent.


But Melania Trump’s mutiny in miniature, the way we conceive of it, is just that: miniature. The belief in a feminist Melania stems from a traditional understanding of how a lady — and, in particular, a first lady — should act. We may spin a story of Melania Trump as empowered, but in that tale she wields her power with womanly subtlety. Her supposed weapons of insurgency are hand-holding snubs (this isn’t the first time), unshared rides, torpedoed trips and cryptic tweets.


If these signs of marital discontent came from a man, few would notice at all, much less treat them as daring displays of defiance. But because they come from a woman, they have turned into just that. We don’t seem to expect Melania to actually do anything to counter her husband, like publicly oppose his policies or politics, or renounce her role in the birther crusade against Barack Obama, or — the seemingly unthinkable — divorce him.


All this is motivated by a familiar stereotype: As much as we want Melania to be a rebel, we want her to be the right kind. And that’s not only because she’s female, and because we’ve been trained to view women as more circumspect and less brash. It’s because, when it comes down to it, she’s in the East Wing representing our country, and a first lady is nothing if not ladylike. If we were really so ready to discard the conventional conception of the role as outmoded and misogynistic nonsense, we wouldn’t be gushing over her in haute couture Chanel, or even marveling at the opulence of the state dinner she planned in the first place.

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nighttimer said:

So will Melania should she forget her place and get too uppity. Melania is not a victim. She's a participant. Perhaps not a happy one, but I've seen nothing to indicate she's being beaten, tormented or mistreated. She's a young woman from another country who came to this one (and greased the pathway for her parents to follow) to become a rich old fart's eye candy and bear him another son. Nobody ever said she had to actually love Donald Trump to become his wife.

...

Melania Trump is supposedly a highly educated woman. Good. That probably means she's read her hubby's most famous ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal and cut a nice one for herself. Melania is somebody's shero, but she's not mine.

Where is Melania? Right where she chose to be.

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