… and unlike Jackie O.
As is the wont of liberal commentary, things are supposed to take on a higher meaning other than face value, including it now seems, footwear. Melania Trump was spotted wearing fashion pumps unpleasing to Liberal World, quickly rising to a Let-Them-Eat-Cake level of nonsense. She is the new Marie Antoinette for favoring one set of loafers over another. Which, of course, invites comparisons to previous first ladies and what their fashion choices of the moment have to say about them in an ever escalating scale of hyperbolic paranoia in public commentary.
Let’s be blunt. Forget Michelle. Michelle is already passé. Any comparison between the current First Lady of the United States and the most recent past First Lady are meant as cover for the debased coin of Barrack Obama’s record. Why? Because rising prosperity and reassertion of the United States on the world stage puts a spot-light on the previous eight inglorious years as wasted opportunity. Nuff said about Michelle.
The most relevant comparison of First Ladies would be to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1929 – 1994), wife of John Kennedy (president 1961–63). At the time, Jackie was seen as bringing a much needed face-lift to the public frumpiness of the Eisenhower years. Jackie’s style was viewed as eclectic and omnicultural, melding European Couture and the Anglosphere into a reinterpretation of what it meant to look and act like an American woman.
Unfortunately for Jackie, and like her husband, her’s was the victory of style over substance. Revelations about her husband’s incessant philandering make that part of her life a sad testament to what it means to be a kept woman. Just as her husband’s career was a creation of his father’s power brokering, so was the marriage of Jack to Jackie.*
As with all figures inside the media eye, caution is needed separating fact from fiction; and, Donald Trump is nothing if not a master of branding. But until proven otherwise, Mr. and Mrs. Trump seem to have a cordial marriage of equals.
So…bring on the snakeskin stilettos and let Liberal World have their tantrum.
*A History of the American People; Johnson, Paul; Harper Collins; New York; 1997; pp 855-857