I just can’t get this Melania coat thing out of my head. The sheer weirdness of it all. Like Trump walking into a Stormy Daniels press conference wearing a pair of comedy breasts. It’s like bleak Milligan humour, but it can’t be. I’ve been trying to compute the meaning all day, and I’m none the wiser. But I’ve come up with a series of options, which, I think, offer an explanation, in order of decreasing probabilty.
And before anyone says its all just more distraction from the real issues, like the Mueller probe, I would say that this is a very real issue. This is about the character and countenance of the leadership of the most powerful nation on the planet. I would say this behaviour is a matter of some urgency.
Option 1. More Trump trolling. Early on the morning of Melania’s trip, Melania’s people get a call from Trump’s people. “We need to fuck with their minds!” bellows a Trump aide down the phone. “Tell Melania to wear the Zara coat.” This is all a ruse dreamed up by one of Trump’s keenest sycophants, keen to jump up an orbit or two in the monstrous gas cloud circling the Trump Black Hole.
Option 2. Pure coinkydinky. How can one expect Melania to be an expert on uranium tipped sartorial missiles? Melania aides are too fearful and deferential to intervene.
Option 3. Could it be a coded fuck you from Melania to hubby? I think it’s safe to assume theirs is not a happy marriage. A couple of weeks ago, her people went out of their way to make it known publicly that Giulani – Trump’s newest right hand man – does not speak for her on the Stormy Daniels issue, or anything else.
One last thing. Do people really wear t-shirts and coats with words, slogans and emblems without thinking for a tiny moment what they might mean? I think it’s even fair to assume some tacit endorsement of the message on display. But can this be true in the curious case of Melania’s coat? Which leads nicely onto:
Option 4. Melania misread the slogan as ‘I really do care, Do U?’
Fuck sake, it’s like those people in China who go around with t-shirts that say things like “INVERT COLESLAW!!” and “WHAT SEE? -> SPUTUM!” in big Katherine Hamnett letters.
I’d possibly pay good money in your earth pounds for an Invert Coleslaw t-shirt. Love their second album ‘Owl Stamp Outrage’.
I must confess to wearing a black, sleeveless “Enjoy Cocaine” t-shirt, in Coca-Cola style lettering, in Benidorm in 1982.
My friend went to 1982 and all he got me was this lousy T-shirt
That was a grim holiday, I can tell you. Last minute deal, two weeks in Benidorm with my parents. A cramped, stifling hotel room, in which we were kept awake every night ’till 4am by the pool party below blasting Ebony and Ivory and The Birdie Song to infinity and beyond.
Wot, no Seven Tears?
(or indeed Wot?)
And did you see the (in)famous cabaret artiste, Sticky Vicky?
A ping-pong ball landed in my Watneys!
According to Wikipedia, she was in Benidorm in ’82, but our paths never crossed.
She was also, I suspect, present at the fall of Rome.
A useful person to go through airports with, I should imagine.
A ‘spokesperson’ said it was meaningless, which is plain bollocks – she’s a former model and renowned clotheshorse in the public eye. She does not wear anything without careful thought.
Trump then weighed in a claimed it was a message to the media, which is lightly more believable, buts suggests that she allowed this message to over ride the one she was meant to be delivering.
The only message she was meant to be delivering is that she does care, and I can only assume that her real message was just what it seemed – a blatant statement that she couldn’t give a toss, and neither should anyone else, even as she was being sent to demonstrate her fluffy side.
Completely bizarre.
Of course claims it is meaningless are utter bollocks. But to whom the message is directed is a mystery. I hope it is President Dumbo, but who really knows?
Why print that slogan on an item of clothing, anyway?
As you will imagine I am not hip to the scene in any way, but is that slogan just some kind of logo which means nothing? Some kind of modern zeitgeist motif, as pointless as ‘Frankie Says…’? A phrase that is meant to be seen as a pattern.
Maybe. Even if it is, the blatant obvious sense of what the words actually do mean is another sign of the tectonic plate sized tone deafness of these people. Never mind that one of her staff should have had a word before she put it on, the woman should have been more aware herself.
I like Melania Trump. She’s reluctant and hopeless but she seemed to be decent at the core, and most certainly not a nasty gangster cretin that looks like Homer Simpson doing a Mussolini impression.
That’s my point – I think she is aware, in particular of her clothes, and so can only assume the choice of jacket was deliberately crass.
Yes, yes it was. Agreed.
I felt the urge to think out loud. It’s all just too astonishing
“Decent at the core” my arse. Melania Trump is a nasty, pig shit thick ignorant racist birther, just like her semi-human shitstain of a husband. Fuck her forever.
Take off your mask and say that, you cad!
This post should end with the words “…and win a Mini Metro!”
Are we doing ‘Stonehenge’ tomorrow night?
Thanks Ruff – that needed saying. Imagine having sex with Trump: I will repeat that….
It’s a coat that costs $36. This ex-model First Lady never wears anything worth less than four figures. Perhaps, she was dressing down to show people she can be ‘street’ and overlooked the slogan?
I think that is the most likely reason. She was given a cheap coat because wearing a high fashion item would have been a bad look. I doubt (and I am giving her the benefit of the doubt) that she took the time to choose that particular item.
I believe it WAS incompetence, but it’s a sign of how dysfunctional that administration is that she was allowed to appear in front of TV cameras wearing it. Of course, no matter how ‘innocent’ a slip it was, Trump managed to make a mountain out of it by claiming it was a clever coded insult to the media.
But in the context of the visit, and the furore surrounding the separation issue, how do you overlook a slogan like that?
By being self obsessed and empty headed?
It wasn’t incompetence. The FLOTUS office wouldn’t allow.
Here’s simple math: everyone in that family, with the possible exception of Barron, are a shower of shits, and that’ as much thinking as you should do.
Actually, I think you may have distilled it down to its essence, Sit
Are you’re saying this boils down to a “Whevs” moment? She didn’t consider or care if the message might appear misguided or inappropriate?
This exactly. The very fact that MT is getting some kind of semi-sympathetic edit right now quite frankly boils my fucking piss.
“It’s not only Donald who wants to see [Obama’s birth certificate], it’s American people who voted for him and who didn’t vote for him. They want to see that”
As I said earlier, fuck her. Fuck her forever. Her and the rest of that venal, racist, treasonous crime family can drown in a vat of their own excrement.
Yeah, but what do you really think?
One thing about Don and Mel, never boring.
Re Mel, smart wonan, how many languages does she speak – is it five ? I do like her impressive independence , doesnt appear to bend much to the whim of Don or the White House
I want to believe there’s some goodness there. But this is a person who chose to marry Trump. How much wisdom can there be? Does she have anything on Trump useful to the Mueller invrstigation? I doubt it. She and Trump rarely seem to speak.
No idea, just saying I dont think she is a puppet.
I think she’s an old fashioned gold digger who now finds herself trapped in a gilded cage with the added unwanted attention of the world’s press.
I refer you to my earlier reply. She was spouting the same racist birther shit, she gets no free pass.
In brief, Melania Trump does not wear a $39, years old jacket without making a deliberate decision to choose that jacket. She was conveying a message, and although the target may be debatable she was more stupid than anyone thinks she is if she didn’t realise that most people would regard it as a huge fuck you to the very people she was going to visit.
Well, yes. These people (the Trumps) are basically a shallow bunch incapable of subtlety or even cleverness, let alone sensitivity. Melania tends to get sympathetic treatment, sometimes cast as a victim, but the rotten truth of it is that she (and the saintly Ivanka) are conniving, venal, lying shitbags who care only about personal aggrandisement.
Hmm how’s your libel lawyer going ?
Nobody knows what the Trumps are thinking, including the Trumps. They are thick ignoramus celebrities, and behave just like them – they have ‘beefs’ with people, do and say stupid things, issue statements, and create a cloud of meaningless noise around them. They have no idea what they are doing and it is the people who voted for them that are to blame.
We need to give less airspace to celebrities. If we don’t, then all major politicians are going to be thick loudmouth idiots. Kanye could be next. We already have Boris.
The BBC gives headline space to ‘beefs’ between (for example) Cardi B and whoever else occasionally ‘drops’ ‘new music’, issues statements about nothing and generally show kids that all you need to do in order to be successful is to say whatever comes into your head.
I like cakes.
For goodness sakes!
Aren’t they the new drugs Noel Edmonds warmed us about?
Mind me Shatner’s!
Noel Edmonds. Ooh, he looks old.
You’d look old if you could see into everybody’s living rooms. You would.
Blobby’s looking well, mind. Pink don’t crack.
Bu5 the hair, beard and wardrobe remain the same. When he re-emerged on that open the box show I saw him memorably described as looking ‘like a much older man who had gone to a fancy dress party in a Noel Edmonds costume’.
Tremendous
Yay! I think you’re alright too, Mooche.
Is is the jam or the cream? Who can say. I’m a strange guy.
I don’t believe that speaking multiple languages is necessarily a sign of being intelligent. That has more to do with having an ear for it and a good memory, and is helped by living in different countries during your life. But I know people who speak several languages and are equally stupid in all of them, and I know very intelligent people who struggle to learn a second language well.
I wish I was in the latter group. I’ve always struggled with languages, unless you count maths.
But what about the language of love?
As you well know, I rely on Joni to help me there.
Great writing (of course) from the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/interrogating-melania-trumps-statement-jacket-and-its-fast-fashion-fascism
Those last couple of sentences are the key.
” Trump went to the border to perform compassion. Her clothes, with their literally literal denial of empathy, did not give a damn.”
With emphasis on “perform”, it seems to me.
They and their kind live in a cloud which merely hovers somewhere around the real world. And they couldn’t care less.
Any excuse
For what it’s worth, I do think she’s trolling her husband, but doing it spectacularly badly.
I’ve checked the weather. Who needs to wear a coat in boiling hot Texas?
I bet Liam Gallagher would wear one. A parka in the sun-shee-ine.
Man not hot.
Now, I believe, Man Don’t Dance.
I think option one is closest, having read this tweet from feministabulous:
“Melania’s jacket is a pristine example of how an authoritarian government operates to delegitimize the press.
Please don’t be fooled. This is 100% bait. It’s an effective strategy to get the media to criticize her wardrobe so that the government can criticize the media for criticizing her wardrobe and delegitimize us as fake news. Shortly after journalists started reporting on the jacket, FLOTUS’ director of communications tweeted a statement criticizing the media for not focusing on the children (even creating a hashtag for the jacket!), when the media is the VERY REASON we found out about the harrowing human rights abuses happening at the border in the first place. Also remember that these abuses were leveled by an administration who repeatedly lied about them with several senior officials denying they happened until the media collected irrefutable evidence that they did. Whatever rules of political discourse used to apply no longer do with this government. Be critical! Most importantly don’t underestimate this regime. Calling this administration dumb is dumb. We made that mistake in 2016. Let’s not make that mistake again. And no hate to the reporters who reported on this. It’s a trap for a reason”.
Not to fuck with people’s minds, but to fuck further with the media’s reputation.
Interesting. There was a guest on this week’s Bill Maher, who seemed to be suggesting (I think) that this was Melania’s garbled attempt to flag the lack of compassion in the White House. So maybe some kind of trolling, as Harold Holt says above.
I find the behaviour – and its ambiguity -deeply sinister, and it leaves little doubt that extremists have infested this administration.
So it’s not just a coat?
In answer to the question I think Habib Koité & Eric Bibb sum it up nicely on behalf of Trump and his entourage.
We love to fly first class
Someone else paid the ticket
We love our juicy fruit
As long as we dont have to pick it
We love our fast food
Don’t care about heart attacks
We love to gossip
Don’t care about the facts
We want the gold
Long as we don’t have to mine it
Don’t care who suffers
Or who’s behind it
We want the cool running shoes
Don’t care who made em
Don’t care if they go to school
Or what the company paid em
We don’t care, we don’t care, we don’t care
We want the cheap gasoline
Jump in the car and go
Don’t care what the world agreed upon
In Kyoto
We heard to all save water
But we don’t even try
Take thirty minute showers
While the well runs dry
We don’t care, we don’t care, we don’t care
The gap is growing wider
Between the rich and the poor
We got everything we need
But we still want more
We don’t care, we don’t care, we don’t care
Do we?