Melania Trump does not often speak to the press. She might want to consider doing even less of it.
“I could say I’m the most bullied person on the world,” Mrs. Trump said in an interview with ABC News that was filmed during her visit to Kenya last week.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama tended a White House garden and encouraged children to eat vegetables. For this, she was attacked as a communist and/or tool of a new vegetable-eating world order bent on indoctrinating our children.
When asked to clarify whether she indeed believed that, Mrs. Trump seemed to couch her reply.
“One of them,” Mrs. Trump said, “if you really see what people saying about me.”
When Michelle Obama and her husband celebrated a victory onstage, Fox News analyzed whether the gesture could be interpreted as a "terrorist fist bump."
“I wish people would focus on what I do,” an exasperated Mrs. Trump said in rare public comments to reporters, “not what I wear.”
Michelle Obama was criticized for showing her upper arms.
It was at one point easy to feel sorry for Melania Trump, who is married to a bullying, lying, cheating oaf of a man now as famous for his affairs as for his cruelty. That point passed. Donald continued his bullying ways, and Melania attempted to inoculate herself via an anti-bullying program aimed at everyone but him. Donald made countless cruel statements and told countless lies on the public stage, and Melania stood silently as he did each. He put young children in tent cities; she did nothing. He mused that he would pay the legal fees of those that roughed up his opponents a little; she did nothing. He was revealed to be a tax cheat who had scammed the nation out of hundreds of millions of dollars; she bought a new outfit.
The family is very good at playing the American aristocrats' preferred role as victims. To hell with your health care; our family is suffering from estate taxes. To hell with police shootings; why, a wealthy white man I know is being investigated for financial crimes. To hell with your right to vote; the real concern here is that the courts not constrain my God-given right to give my own preferred candidates as much cash and publicity as is necessary to overwhelm those I oppose.
Among the people more "bullied" than Melania Trump in recent days: A journalist who was killed, dismembered, and spirited out of a dictator's embassy by a squad devoted to that singular purpose. A woman who cannot yet return home due to death threats, after she spoke out about a powerful man's past sexual assault. Every voter whose right to vote is now in doubt in Georgia, in Ohio, and in other states as conservatives seek to shrink those rights with a series of new tests, constraints, and dodges. Every single person who has ever spoken up publicly against her husband, only to be the subject of one of his maudlin but vicious public rants.
To be sure, it is perhaps to be expected that every person in the world will find insults to their own ego of far greater import than the struggles of absolutely anyone else. It is not to a person's credit, however, to make it so obvious.