Melania Trump has always been a smart dresser (or maybe not always), but perhaps one sartorial choice from her First Lady era stands out amongst the rest. In the summer of 2018, during a trip to Texas to meet migrant children who’d been separated from their parents (thanks to her husband’s zero-tolerance policies), she wore a jacket that bore a strange, cryptic message: “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” At the time many speculated that the message was a tone-deaf “let them have cake”-style salvo, concerning the problems her husband had caused in the world. But now it appears the message had a more specific target.
The New York Post got their mitts on Katie Rogers’ forthcoming book American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden. One of the juicier tidbits is that Melania was engaged in a quiet tussle with her stepdaughter, Ivanka.
Ivanka was reportedly planning to move in on Melania’s territory. That included usurping the East Wing of the Executive Mansion, traditionally the purview of the First Lady, and making it more about the First Family. Trump himself told his wife that he thought it best if Ivanka was “helping her and working with her” in her FLOTUS duties.
Melana, Rogers writes, did not like this. And so began a battle between her and who she dubbed “The Princess,” with both avoiding each other despite working in such close quarters.
At the time of Melania’s apparently misread jacket incident, she and Ivanka “were locked in a quiet competition for press coverage,” Rogers reported.
Alas, things didn’t work out quite as Melania hoped. “If she ever waged a battle over the issue,” Rogers wrote, “it is one she clearly lost: For four years, it was hard to see where the operations of the family business stopped and the Trump administration started.”
If this report is accurate, then it wasn’t about cruel indifference to human suffering caused by her husband. It was just a petty little attack from one powerful woman to her also powerful stepdaughter. Maybe this helps explain that little death stare Melania shot Ivanka during the 2020 RNC.
(Via NY Post)