For the first time since the ancient mists of the Chester A. Arthur administration, back when presidents had whiskers and posed for daguerreotypes, the country finds itself without an active, gracious, fully engaged First Lady, one half of a matching set. Melania Trump, the nominal First Lady, has been teleported into the Phantom Zone, that hazy limbo for living ghosts who may observe earthly affairs but not participate. It is a gilded Phantom Zone, maintained and Secret Service-protected at an unconscionably high cost to the taxpayers, but it is no glowing East Room to preside over. Melania’s maternal duties to young son Barron can’t entirely explain her semi-exile and negligible footing, a comedown from the majestic wingspan and marquee stardom of Michelle Obama. We’ve had First Ladies who were seen but seldom heard (Pat Nixon), and now we have one who is neither seen nor heard. Some would say “Good riddance” to the historic partnership role and hostess duties of the First Lady, arguing that it’s an antiquated institution, a heteronormative-helpmate pose long overdue for the heave-ho, and I might agree—in theory. Only, we don’t live today in trim theory or on some ideal plane but in sprawling, tremoring reality, and the absence of a First Lady in this White House is proving to be yet another Trumpian break with precedent that represents a bold step back into the men’s-club locker room.
Whatever the press may make of her wardrobe selection, the First Lady can be a guidance system for the president, an envoy to parts of the country that have been neglected (Eleanor Roosevelt), a cultural taste-maker (Jacqueline Kennedy), and a reality check telling POTUS what his inner circle, currying favor and taking mental notes for their self-serving memoirs, won’t. (George W. Bush later admitted that he had been chastened by wife Laura’s chiding over his Wyatt Earp “Wanted: dead or alive” and “Bring ‘em on” bluster post-9/11.) Privately, a woman’s touch is often needed in the White House, whether it’s a steadying hand on the shoulder or a judo chop to the back of the neck. Publicly, nearly every First Lady has flourished an identifying issue (Lady Bird Johnson, highway beautification; Nancy Reagan, “Just Say No” to drugs; Michelle Obama, physical activity and healthy eating). Melania Trump’s was to be cyberbullying, a ludicrously unself-aware, doomed-from-the-start crusade, given her husband’s stubby-fingered prowess as chief Twitter Troll. As any number of people have observed, if Melania really wanted to curb cyberbullying, the first, best thing she could do would be to confiscate her husband’s Android phone and flush it down the toilet. Good luck with that. Given his nocturnal addiction to Twitter, he won’t surrender his phone until it’s pried out of his cold dead hand.
Melania’s surfacings since the election have been sparse, wan, and imbued with pathos. On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump (impeachment can’t come soon enough) wheeled around and snapped something to the smiling Melania that caused her face to deflate and those standing near her to look concerned, slightly stunned. Whatever Trump said knocked the wind from his wife’s sails on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion for her, even if a mourning day for most of us. (Barack and Michelle Obama were later shown bracing their hands against Melania’s back, as if offering reassurance.) At the Super Bowl party held at West Palm Beach’s Trump International Golf Club, Melania perched next to her husband at a roped-off V.I.P. table strewn with junk-food wrappers; she was wearing the captive, opaque expression of a hostage on display, a Bride of Dracula sentenced to a kiddies’ birthday party in perpetuity.
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Which is not to solicit pity for Melania. She married into her plight and—like nearly everybody else connected by blood, cronyism, or parasitic attachment to the Trump Inc. enrichment program—assumed she had found the side door to Fort Knox. In Melania’s libel suit against the company which publishes the Daily Mail Web site, over its claim that she had worked for an escort service, her lawyer Charles Harder argued that major damage was done to the Melania brand by this scurrilous item, adversely affecting her “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to monetize her brand, a hitherto unexploited First Lady perk. (The statement was later amended.) Perhaps Melania can hawk Trump-related merch on one of the home-shopping networks until her brand is fully exonerated, hosting from the Joan Rivers Memorial Suite at Mar-a-Lago.
It was the First Daughter, Ivanka, who was cast as the actual First Lady-in-waiting, the platinum heiress. Ivanka always seemed in tighter orbit around the Sun King than wife number three, and pre-inauguration articles fashioned her as the domestic goodwill ambassador, tasked with addressing the issues of workingwomen and child care and being her father’s shiny smoother-over. In truth, Ivanka was never more than an artificial sweetener. Given her father’s misogynist rap sheet and the reactionary makeup of his Cabinet picks, there was never a chance she could front a plausible case that the administration was sensitive to women’s issues—it was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat, to borrow an immortal line from The Catcher in the Rye. A convert to Orthodox Judaism, Ivanka was also billed as a valuable outreach vessel—along with her husband, Jared Kushner—to the Jewish community, which the Trump administration sorely needs, given the white-nationalist catechisms of Trump Whisperers Steve Bannon, chief political strategist, and Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser and sinister golem. The intentional, unpardonable omission of the millions of Jewish victims in the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement made their tightrope liaisoning with the Jewish community even trickier, revealing that it was the Breitbartian henchmen calling the shots. In a tweet ripping the department-store chain Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka’s line of apparel and accessories, Trump barked, “She is a great person—always pushing me to do the right thing!” Laudable, but the results speak for themselves. In coaxing her father to do the right thing, Ivanka has mostly whiffed.
How could she not? The First Lady’s degree of sway rests on her hubby president’s being cognitively supple and emotionally receptive to persuasion, and on his trusting, respecting, and being willing to listen to his wife (or, here, darling daughter), to take her seriously as a person and perception. But since it’s Donald Trump we’re talking about, you can chuck all of that into the Dumpster. Nothing in Trump’s life and public career indicates that he considers women anything more than the hunting trophies of alpha-manhood, which explains his appeal to the gorilla tribes of the men’s-rights movement; women’s minds, concerns, opinions, and passions are annoying incidentals, unwelcome intrusions. As if thawed out from a giant ice cube, Trump is a Rat Pack relic, his White House a Rat Pack retirement home. Autocratic and bristling with iron whims, carving a big hole in the air with every entrance, Trump is the Frank Sinatra godfather figure, the Chairman of the Bored, unable to focus on anything complicated for longer than a firefly flicker. Steve Bannon, he of the boiling, 18th-century countenance, is the Dean Martin sidekick—not the wisecracking, slippery-boned Dino with his glass of happy juice, but a Dino with a dark lunar side, imbibing warlock brew and contemplating the orgasmic red clouds of World War III as he slides an executive order under Trump’s bobbing nose to sign. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, adviser, and freelance diplomat, is the Peter Lawford stand-in, not as suave or debonair, perhaps, but craftier, P.R.-conscious—which doesn’t make him any less dubious an influencer as the Trump-Bannon mind-meld executes its power moves. Reince Priebus is Joey Bishop, because somebody’s got to be. There is no Sammy Davis Jr. in this scenario because a black man, even playing the part of jester, wouldn’t blend into the color scheme of pure whiteyhood that is the alt-right sagging-beefcake ideal. Kellyanne Conway will have to suffice as the Angie Dickinson token blonde and all-around fun gal, eclipsed in the public eye by Sean Spicer’s virtuoso performances of steampunk apoplexy as White House press secretary.
In the Rat Pack movies, Frank and the fellas plan capers and play cards; this Rat Pack plots the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Dodd-Frank, voting rights, Russia sanctions, and Medicare/Medicaid coverage, with a host of other nasties on their to-do list. All of this might have been avoided if we had elected a woman president, but that opportunity is gone for the foreseeable future, and the future has never been less foreseeable. It’s hard to get a good view while you’re dive-bombing.
