The Only Real and Important Meaning of Melania Trump’s Inauguration Hat

Melania set out the bait, and we, the people, did what we do: we ate it up like hungry little mice gobbling up a block of cheese.

She wore a hat, and we variously read meaning into or ridiculed it.

Okay, mostly we ridiculed it.

To judge is human, but Americans are like a judgment truck with the carburetor stuck wide open, flooding the engine with spite fuel, which of course suits “the Right” just fine. See? We told you we were the victims of intolerant people who hate us, people who shall henceforth be referred to as “The Left,” even though mockery and the unending need to out-clever the rest of the internet are, sadly, universal urges in these here parts (folks who aren’t unironically calling for an end to being nice to black people just happen to be better at being funny than folks who hate transpeople). If there were an organized group behind the mockery, they would be playing right into the hands of the very organized group who has incidentally brought Melania back to the forefront of American discourse. Those folks benefit when other people focus on things like the First Lady’s headwear, when they make it personal in the wrong way.

For better or for worse, there’s little practical consequence to anything a First Lady wears, says, or does. Did you notice when Nancy Reagan won the war on drugs and illiteracy? Of course you didn’t, because she made zero impact on either. Remember when Michelle Obama overcame the deleterious effects of our food system that cranks out the human equivalent of rabbit pellets (the stuff coming out the back, not the wholesome green stuff going in the front)? There’s nothing to remember, because we’re still eating thinly disguised poison and/or whole foods wrapped in enough plastic to choke a grey whale. The closest a First Lady came to making a real difference was Hillary’s attempt to reform healthcare, but despite her unusual influence on legislation by way of leverage with her husband (🤔 wonder why…), even this seemingly female issue was relegated to the fate of most First Lady initiatives: futile irrelevance. Makes you wonder how the unrequited social experiment of a First Gentleman’s initiatives might play out. Guess we’ll just have to wait.

Melania goes through the motions, too, of course, but what people really thought mattered during her husband’s first term was whether she renegotiated her prenup after the Access Hollywood tape and whether she might divorce 45-cum-47. Even that doesn’t matter anymore. What’s a(nother) little break with decorum in an administration headed by a convicted felon who just pardoned hundreds of violent insurrectionists? That man will just keep on signing whatever executive orders the awful machinery supporting him churns out. Well, the orders that tickle his fancy.

That’s the only personal side that matters: understanding what tickles his fancy and why.

The personal is political, where it intersects between his brain and his signing hand. What motivates this man and the people around him is important, but no one is really going “there,” i.e.: the right place, the deep recesses of his and his enablers’ minds.

Going back to Melania for a second, it is worth understanding her attitudes towards public service [sic], as spoken through her clothes; and on that front, there’s only one outfit that matters:

Ah, good times.

She later came out and said it was a message to the media. Be that as it may, I like to take things people say at face value (if a socially inept white guy who seem awfully okay with white supremacists gives a Nazi salute at a rally, I’m going to see it as a Nazi salute, because: duh). As the saying goes, a lot of truth is said in jest. If she was speaking to the media, she was literally questioning whether they actually care about the children suffering lifelong trauma after being separated from their parents. To paraphrase: “Please, pay attention to my initiatives (remember — the cyberbullying solution?), instead of pretending you care. I’m admitting that I don’t.”

You know what? I believe her.

From this and other interviews and actions she’s taken, a picture of Melania emerges. She never signed up to be First Lady. She likes fancy clothes and nice things. She’s a formerly poor girl from Slovenia who happened to meet a rich-ish, powerful-ish man who cheated on her multiple times, and yet she never left. Despite the speculation, there’s no sign she’s ever thought of leaving. She may be disinterested in being at the White House, but that’s probably because it smells funny and doesn’t have gold toilets. Now he is very rich (thanks, meme stock and meme coins) and very powerful (thanks, “originalists when convenient to our worldview” jurists).

Her reasons are known only to her, but she does like showing up to fancy balls and dressing up. When it looked like he was going to lose the election, she was nowhere to be seen. Now that people are fawning all over him and there’s pageantry to participate in, she’s back in. Just like the Supreme Court, it is convenient to her interests to play dress-up and pretend she’s First Lady. She has no real interest in public service, and that’s the true meaning to take away from her trolling all of us with her hat. I’m sure she knew it would be talked about. She doesn’t really care — do you?

That’s the real thing to understand about her and, more importantly, the man she’s married to. I know the conventional wisdom — opposites attract — but there’s other conventional wisdom: birds of a feather flock together. She runs in a crowd of very self-interested people.

Now, we are all self-interested, but some of us see our self interests served by finding common interest with others. We’ve seen the rewards — emotional, practical, material — of cooperating and being reasonable with other humans. Those are likely not the lessons Princess Melania learned, trading off her looks for special treatment (I’m referring to the rewards of modeling, not her marriage to DJT, which I take at face value: I assume she fell in love with him).

And reasonableness and common cause are not the rewards DJT is likely to have learned from his upbringing or his introduction to the world of “business” (if that’s a fair term for withholding fair housing from black people). What cynical lessons would a DJT learn from a lifetime of stiffing vendors and forcing them to sue to get paid? DJT is perpetually in pursuit of things that would relieve him of his father’s dissatisfaction.

I know we’re not supposed to criticize toxic masculinity anymore (Zuck says so, and Jerry Seinfeld agrees), but good god, if I could add up all the happiness forgone during just the last 100 years due to fathers misguidedly withholding affection to make their boys “strong” and then accrue just .0001% of that missing happiness upon today’s lost generation of men, I would put Eli Lilly out of business (sorry not sorry). Fred Trump, like so many generations of American fathers, reminds me of the Emperor in the video at the top of the page: encouraging and rewarding anger and vengeance. Turning callousness into a virtue is an awful, destructive thing, and it leads people to do awful things. To find joy in others’ misery. To seek out power and domination, even to the point of ruin. To find the most vulnerable creatures and then whip them until they more vulnerable yet.

Trauma has a long half life, and we are about to live through its long decay.

All that matters, when you are being led by someone with this fragile, zero-sum understanding of humanity (and masculinity’s supposed role within it) is to pay attention to the possibilities afforded him by institutional power and what options are available to the rest of us to achieve something better: to enact helpful policies, to create greater cohesion on the path to a greater common good. That’s news coverage I would love to see (influential as they are, The New York Times can’t do it all on its own).

Instead, what we get are three things that are not useful at all:

1. On the one hand, the supposed left-leaning news media provide coverage of this administration as if it is a normal administration motivated by a spirit of national interest, instead of what it’s actually motivated by: the kind of maximum advantage cum cruelty that would have led to sparse praise from Fred Trump (trigger warning: photo of man in a blue suit with a leering smile enclosed). The media breathlessly report on every move he makes, instead of evaluating the intersection of policy and public interest.
2. Superficial discourse, like the obsession with Melania’s hat or Trump’s supposedly uncontrollable flatulence. Again, this is not the work of an organized or monolithic group (unlike, say, the embarrassingly juvenile “Let’s go, Brandon” taunt), but to the extent it appears like the collective attitude of “the elites,” well…perception is reality, and it doesn’t serve any of us well.
3. Real analysis and commentary wrapped in jest from folks like the Daily Show and Last Week Tonight. They do real, in-depth analysis at times, but they apologize for it with a smirk. There were times when The Problem with Jon Stewart came close to being real, unironic, unapologetic journalism. More of that, please.

But for the right posture, the right vocabulary, the right subject matter, the cynical world of ad hominem anger will have the upper hand. Those who don’t care can play off of anger. Their agenda works in a climate of vitriol. In fact, it feeds off of it. We all — not the left, but all of us who are in it together — need to look past the superficially personal details (like a hat) to the personal details that matter, if we truly care.

I really do care. Do you?