Jill Biden graces the cover of Vogue magazine, an honor in American fashion and culture that famously eluded her predecessor, Melania Trump, probably because Donald Trump’s wife was heavily criticized by likely Vogue readers for enabling his divisive presidency, including during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Melania Trump herself acknowledged this lack of recognition by Vogue and other top U.S. life-style magazines with a notorious f-bomb-laced comment. “I don’t give a (expletive) about Vogue or any other magazine. They would never put me on the cover,” Melania Trump was recorded as saying to her ex-best friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.
Jill Biden’s glowing Vogue cover story comes as Melania Trump faces renewed interest in her tenure as first lady, including her reported attempt to help her husband spin the political fallout after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Late last week, Trump defended his wife’s glamour, the controversial Rose Garden makeover and White House Christmas decorations during in an interview with the Trump-friendly outlet, Newsmax. The Slovenian-born ex-model also was a trending topic on Twitter over the weekend, with people asking why she had been absent from her husband’s side lately, including being missing from photos at his 75th birthday party at his New Jersey golf resort earlier this month.
Now this week, with Vogue unveiling its 6,000-word profile of Jill Biden, Melania Trump is shown in a new book, playing a brief but telling role in trying to help her husband and his close associates avoid responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.
I posted about this earlier, but it’s worth doing again:
According to “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” by controversial author Michael Wolff, Trump’s family knew he had lost the election and understood there was little chance of upsetting the electoral count.
Nonetheless, they did little to try to stop Trump who was being encouraged in this “derangement” by his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was drinking heavily and “in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania,” Wolff wrote in his book, which is excerpted in New York Magazine.
In fact, some family members, including Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, made public statements at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, showing support their father’s election fraud claims and likewise urging his supporters to “fight.”
Meanwhile, Melania Trump had reportedly already “checked out” of her job as first lady by Jan. 6, and was preparing for her post-White House life at Mar-a-Lago, according to CNN and other reports. That day, she was busy with a post-White House project: overseeing a photo shoot for a coffee-table book on decorative projects she had amassed and restored during his time as first lady.
Later that night, Melania Trump joined her husband in a phone call with senior advisor Jason Miller. Trump said, “This looks terrible. This looks really bad,” after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol.
Trump then said, “Hold on, our great first lady is here.”
After switching to speakerphone, Melania Trump said sharply: “The media is trying to go and say this is who we are. We don’t support this.”
It took Melania Trump another five days before she finally issued a statement about the insurrection. She criticized the violence, but she nonetheless praised the “passion and enthusiasm” of those who joined her husband in protesting the election results.
“It is inspiring to see that so many have found a passion and enthusiasm in participating in an election, but we must not allow that passion to turn to violence,” said Melania Trump, whose “Be Best” platform as first lady centered on promoting civility and kindness.
Melania is very beautiful, a former model who looked fabulous in clothes and portrayed a glamorous image not seen since Jackie Kennedy. But because she is a terrible person, married to a monster, none of that really mattered and I frankly don’t think anyone even noticed that much. Her stepdaughter Ivanka has had much the same fate.
Beautiful is as beautiful does.
