Vanity Fair is right about one thing: John Legend and Chrissy Teigen seem like they’d make an admirable first family.
Legend, the “All of Me” singer and first black man to earn an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), is a smooth and charming performer. Teigen, a model and cookbook creator adored by the media for her sass, has all the poise and power of the first lady. Neither of them has alluded to a White House bid, but Vanity Fair sure wishes they’d run.
For its December cover story, the magazine published a gushing profile, lauding the couple as “the first family we deserve.” Why? Not so much because of their respective careers or personas. Mostly because of their anti-Trump tweets.
The article’s online headline emphasizes Legend’s characterization of President Trump as a “shitty human being” and opens with the story about how a Twitter exchange between Trump and Teigen ended up printed in the grand entryway to her Beverly Hills home. Teigen appears to refer to all Trump supporters as “a bunch of bigots.”
That’s enough for the author to characterize the couple as a salve for an aching nation. After Teigen posted a video of Legend singing with their son, journalist Karen Valby writes, “It worked like a balm for her millions of followers — the pleasure of song and the power of parent-child connection — on that first chaotic weekend after news of the impeachment inquiry broke.”
It’s hard to imagine a more East Coast elite take than the idea that America desperately needed a video of a millionaire singing to his son while more political cogs were turning in Washington. The article also gushes, apropos of nothing, “How could Trump’s ego withstand the couple’s goodness and glamour? Legend and Teigen are a reminder of what it was like to have #RelationshipGoals in the White House.”
To top it off, the couple is voting for Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren because, as Legend puts it, to do otherwise would presumably be to be “threatened by the idea of a woman president.” He has also criticized Kanye West for his support of Trump. Even after West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, visited the White House to advocate for criminal justice reform, a cause Legend has also claimed as his own, Legend says that was a “cheap win” for Trump.
Sure, needlessly incarcerated women such as Cyntoia Brown have been able to walk free, but, Teigen says, “To be able to go in there and put whatever you hate about him aside to do this greater good for this person? I don’t know if I could physically muster that smile and handshake.”
So, what she’s saying is that partisanship should trump important causes, and bipartisanship is thus something to be avoided, a great lesson from the first family that is supposed to heal us all.
The Vanity Fair feature is the latest in glowing media coverage of Legend and Teigen, separately and as a couple. Not all of it is undeserved. But the remarkable thing about the way the media portrays this couple, who live in an (at least) three-story mansion in Beverly Hills, is that they’ve been given a sort of apotheosis.
They’re not just talented or cute together or #RelationshipGoals. They’re seen as a “balm” for America, specifically in reference to their contrast with Trump. The media is constantly praising Teigen for her “clapbacks.” This spring, fans applauded her for telling women to say “f— you” more. She clarified that she meant if not with words, “at least with your eyes and your vote.”
Somehow, it seems possible that voting to say “f— you” is precisely what resulted in Trump winning the 2016 election. But it couldn’t be possible that celebrities might be blinded by their own political allegiances, could it?
The more the media praises celebrities, treating them like gods — particularly for their opposition to the “shitty human being” in the White House — the more the rift between Americans will grow. The “balm” we need is not an outspokenly partisan celebrity couple. It’s not a celebrity at all. And if we keep trying to find saviors in our celebrities, we’ll end up exactly where we ended up in 2016.
