The Ahabs at the Washington Post continue their obsessive pursuit of the Great Orange Whale. And if that means harpooning the inoffensive spouse of their prey, so be it. Witness an extended Post article last week, “The AWOL first lady,” which takes Melania Trump to task for being “barely visible.” The first lady hasn’t done any public appearances since the inaugural festivities, nor has she made herself available to the press, tut-tutted the Post, going on to note, disapprovingly, that Mrs. Trump “has not indicated with any specificity what she has planned for her new role.”
As if that weren’t indictment enough, the Post sputtered on, “The first lady’s quiet first week” is “raising questions about her willingness to shape her public image.” (Clearly a violation of Article VIII of the Constitution, which enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president’s significant other.) Worse still, “Melania Trump appears to be in no hurry to heed the call of duty.” Downright dereliction!
The Scrapbook may be forgiven, we hope, for failing to get all worked up. The fact that Mrs. Trump has chosen to reside with her 10-year-old son at their home in New York until the end of the school year strikes us as perfectly reasonable. And what appears to be her general indifference to the folderol of official Washington suggests Melania is sensible and then some.
The president’s wife may traditionally be the White House “hostess,” but at the moment, Donald Trump seems to have things on his mind other than entertaining. Perhaps in time that will change and no doubt Mrs. Trump will get around to appointing the regular FLOTUS flotsam—social secretaries, directors of communications, and various deputy directors of policies and projects and whatnot. But what if she doesn’t? We’ve had bachelor presidents, widowed presidents, and presidents whose wives avoided Washington whenever possible. The nation endured.
Indeed, the whole notion of a ceremonial, even bureaucratic, first lady is a relatively modern phenomenon: The term didn’t exist until the middle of the 19th century. Come the 20th, Eleanor Roosevelt may have shown what could be done by an ambitious presidential spouse. But her successor set a different example entirely: Bess Truman hated the circus so much that she spent a good part of her husband’s presidency at her mother’s house in Missouri.
Now, of course, a whole wing of the executive mansion is devoted to the Office of the First Lady, where a staff of some two dozen consumes taxpayer funds to project a political image of public engagement, domestic bliss, and high fashion sense. Anything that our Slovenian-born first lady does to dial down the imperial pomp is a service to American democracy. And The Scrapbook can’t help but admire—in this time of bullhorns and boisterous blowhards—someone who doesn’t feel the need to insert herself unnecessarily into the national tantrum.
