For eight years, Melania Trump has done a brilliant job of keeping us all guessing. Is she, as gossips have long suggested, secretively estranged from her errant husband? Does she hate politics? Or is she, behind closed doors, the real force that drives the Trump family’s remorseless ambition?
Nobody seems to know and that has only added to her allure. The former and perhaps soon-to-be again First Lady has been a smoking-hot riddle and people of all political persuasions seem to adore her for it.
Now, however, at arguably the crunch moment of the American presidential election cycle, Melania is busy promoting Melania, her new autobiography – and suddenly her sphinxish appeal is melting like a bad facelift.
This week, with a month to go before ‘America decides’ on 5 November, she plunged herself into the sturm und drung of the culture wars by coming out as a staunch pro-abortionist.
‘Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body?’ she asks, in a passage from her book now leaked to the press.
‘A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes,’ she says.
‘Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.’
The question that springs to mind is: did the Trump campaign put her up to it? Melania’s seemingly AI-generated language echoes the more popular message of Kamala Harris on abortion. It’s clear that, in an increasingly post-Christian America, the Republican party is out-of-step with majority opinion on the subject of abortion.
If Donald Trump loses next month, it will be in large part because women don’t tend to like him and many blame him for the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe vs Wade, which effectively ended the federal right to terminate a pregnancy. The Democrats know abortion is a winning issue for them, which is why they never stop talking about what they euphemistically call ‘reproductive freedom.’
Donald, having taken credit for appointing three of the conservative justices who swayed that Supreme Court verdict, sees the problem. That’s why throughout this year he has been eager to distance himself from the pro-life movement he once so avidly wooed. He’s insisted, for instance, that he does not support a federal ban and has opposed moves by states such as Florida to introduce a six-week limit on abortions.
So is Melania, in declaring her pro-abortionism, trying to help her husband by signalling that Trumpism is a broad church on matters of morality? If that’s the case, it seems a short-sighted ploy. It’s hard to imagine any woman deciding to vote Trump simply because Melania has made the correct feminist noises. It’s easy, by contrast, to see how Melania’s now public views might convince a devout Christian who regards abortion as evil to not vote Trump.
Perhaps she really does passionately believe in a woman’s right to abort – and felt she had to say so in print. Or perhaps, as a former fashion model, she is just desperate to show the world that she falls in line with trendy opinion.
Again, nobody knows. Strangely, however, that doesn’t make Melania more of an enigma. On the contrary, her ‘my body, my choice’ shtick has already turned her into a different kind of public figure – more political to some and therefore less intriguing to all.
She is no longer the woman who incensed progressive opinion without saying anything by wearing that mysterious ‘I don’t care’ jacket as a row about her husband’s immigration policies raged. She’s now is angering conservatives by saying rather too much.
After the ‘MELANIA BACKS ABORTION’ broke on Thursday, she took to social media to keep the publicity burning. ‘Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard,’ she declared, in yet another black-and-white promo video that looked a lot like an advertisement for over-priced scent.
Such grandstanding is hard to take from a woman for whom nobody has ever voted. Melania, we thought we didn’t know ye, and life was better then.
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