I am not sure that Melania Trump had the introduction of Henry IV Part 2 in mind when she sat down for her free and frank discussion with the jackals of the — er, with a respected ABC correspondent during her recent trip to Africa. But time and again she dilated upon the ‘unpleasant’, erring and intrusive ‘speculation’ of the media.
In Shakespeare’s play, the action starts with a warning: ‘Rumour is a pipe/ Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures/ And of so easy and so plain a stop/ That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,/ The still–discordant wavering multitude,/ Can play upon it.’
There are a lot of chattering, still discordant heads on view in Tom Llamas’s sit-down with the First Lady. ‘Once, a private woman,’ the two-L Llamas declares in his opening voice-over. ‘Now, the most deeply personal details of her life on full display.’
Well, not really. ‘No topic is off limits,’ Llamas excitedly bleated. But although there were several embarrassing questions — the Access Hollywood tape made an appearance, as did Stormy Daniels — somehow the embarrassment pooled at the feet of the interviewer, not the interviewee. ‘Why are you asking her that?’ was a question I found myself posing frequently when wading through the muck of this interview.
The Slovenia-born Melania was a fashion model before meeting Donald Trump, and she is easily the most glamorous First Lady since Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, once you scrape off the fetid glint of Kennedy mystique, she is probably the most glamorous ever. Yet when she wears a white pith helmet on her trip to Africa the press goes wild. Isn’t a pith helmet a ‘symbol of colonialism’ and (alleged) European exploitation of Africa?
No. It’s a pith helmet. She wore a safari hat on a safari, as one of Melania’s spokeswomen tartly observed.
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