First Lady Melania Trump has been notably absent during all the furor over her husband ordering the complete destruction of the White House East Wing, where her office was until recently.
As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown wrote on Friday morning, Donald Trump has been out selling the idea that the East Wing was not needed and considered disposable so he could build his garish $350 billion ballroom that would be used intermittently.
According to Brown, the abrupt destruction of the structure, will little advance notice, has forced the first lady’s staff to be dispersed to other locations in the White House with no permanent home for them being announced.
More importantly, he wrote, has been Melania's disappearing act as her working space was dismantled.
”Her silence only highlights her approach to much of her husband’s second term — and how little she likely cares about the ways her husband’s unnecessary vanity project will affect her potential successors,” he wrote before pointing out, “former staffers of Melania Trump’s predecessors told East Wing Magazine that seeing their former offices demolished was ‘jarring,’ ‘a gut punch’ and ‘revolting.’”
As for Melania’s vanishing act, Brown suggested she has never really been invested in being first lady, writing, “During her husband’s first term, it was clear that she didn’t love the traditional roles and duties foisted on the first lady. Even as she launched her Be Best anti-bullying initiative, she grumbled privately about all the 'Christmas stuff' she was forced to oversee. She was almost entirely missing from the campaign trail for large swaths of Trump’s bid to reclaim the presidency last year.”
Reporting, “as of Thursday evening, it was unclear whether permanent office space for the first lady has been incorporated into the designs for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom set to occupy the former East Wing’s grounds,” he added, “If the move back to the Executive Mansion becomes permanent, it would be a regressive move that literally moves the Office of the First Lady away from the office and back into the home.”
“The lack of comment at all from Melania Trump on that shift underscores that, much like her husband, she has little interest in how her choices affect anyone other than herself,” he wrote.
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