Melania Trump just released a scripted response to the shocking revelation of an audio recording where her husband, the Republican nominee, described his sexual harassment, assaults and infidelity to her in 2005 within a year of their wedding vows - while the former model was pregnant with their son.
Notably, her statement does say that she accepted Trump’s apology, and that she “hopes people will” accept the emotionless false apology her husband delivered via a campaign script last night.
Notably, Melania Trump did not tweet a copy of her response on her verified personal twitter account, unlike the recent controversy surrounding her immigration status, which arose from nude girl on girl photos published in August, so instead The Atlantic reports:
The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me. This does not represent the man I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation in the world.
What kind of woman scorned would say such a thing? Melania might as well have tweeted, “Forget my husband’s sexual assault, cheating and shocking openness about it and focus on this election. I don’t forgive him, but you should.”
Likely, this was a statement drafted by one of the Trump Campaign’s women, probably Kellyanne Conway, who has assumed control as the public face of the campaign as the third campaign manager in as many months, succeeding the Ukraine focused Paul Manafort in August.
Melania ― who is a Slovenian immigrant ― has kept a fairly low profile in this year’s campaign in which her husband takes credit for raising immigration as a lever for open racial discrimination. She exploded into the campaign with a trio of disastrous scandals involving her plagiarized RNC speech, her false resume that led to deleting most of her personal website and the above mentioned photos.
It makes sense that she’d stay quiet, too, because her presence on the campaign trail provides little to her husband other than a reminder of his most extreme quality: open hypocrisy. Donald Trump’s anti-immigration platform has acted as little more than the thinnest disguise for his transformation of the Republican Party from a cruelly efficient purveyor of “dog whistle politics,” into little more than the progressive wing of the KKK.
But hypocrisy has been the core of the Republican Party since its politicians made their proverbial deal with the devil, inviting religious interests out of the churches and directly into the political realm. It created the conservatives and creationists coalition that held the Oval Office for 20 out of 28 years, gave rise allies like Osama Bin Laden and Sadaam Hussein who later became enemies requiring costly wars (of choice at times) which are still ongoing. Then, Republicans outsourced America’s manufacturing jobs and inflicted financial crises that crashed our economy not once (S&L Crisis), but a second time at the end of those years, which became the Great Recession of 2008.
Donald Trump is not only the most traditional Republican politician alive, he is actually the paradigm their party has strived to enthrone in today’s post-Tea Party political environment. Trump hires foreign workers for low-skilled jobs, while simultaneously blaming foreigners for taking American jobs.
It’s not like Donald Trump would want local women who might know about labor laws, they might sue! It’s hard work getting sued over 3,000 times in just 30 years, so Trump imported women illegally from around the world like cattle, and worked them with little to no compensation ― certainly no legal compensation- - as “Trump Models” which is facing multiple federal investigations. Amazingly, even those women managed to find counsel and file an action in federal court too.
Melania Trump is Exhibit A of Donald Trump’s hypocrisy, being the foreigner who did come to America for work and theoretically took a job from some local woman by working for far less money. Considering her tenuous position today, likely bound by agreement to a strict pre-nuptual agreement, which one of Trump’s ubiquitous non-disparagement contracts. The Republican nominee demanded that even call center employees contract away their right to criticize Trump, so it’s logical that he’d do the same to his wife, or worse.
It is no wonder that Melania doesn’t speak out like Ghazala Khan did. The revered Gold Star mother whose son perished in service of our country wrote this understated, eloquent editorial in the Washington Post in July.
Donald Trump insinuated that Ghazala Khan, “wasn’t allowed to say anything.” Melania Trump’s unemotional response, without accepting Trump’s apology and call to “focus on the important issues,” virtually screams compulsion to remain silent and scripted by the campaign.
It is extremely likely that Melania Trump was not allowed to draft her own statement, and that unacceptable and offensive was as strong as she was allowed to write or say. Her passivity and glaring silence on that issue, is the only allowed form of self-expression while she’s living under the Trump Organization’s roof, beholden to her own deal with the Republican nominee.
Ironically, Melania Trump did prove one thing by immigrating to America and becoming Donald Trump’s wife. It’s demonstrably true that immigrants often come to the United States to take the most thankless jobs that nobody born in this country wants do do even for a short time ― if at all.
Because who else would’ve known that’s it’s possible to silence your own wife in public that way?
Only Donald Trump
Note: Title updated to say “On Twitter’ instead of “other people should.” In statement verified personal twitter account. The word “rather” was removed.