Melania Trump:Looking for a platform, and a stylist.

[Becky]

I don't have sympathy for her, exactly - she may not have signed up for being First Lady, but she knew who she was marrying.  And - I will forever carry the image of her in that "I don't care" jacket.  Anyone that callous and clueless is not a sympathetic character in any way.  However, I have little doubt that she is reaping what she has sown, and pretty much hates her life right now. 

[47of74]

Wait a sec.

Question: Instead of Mrs. Herr Orange should it instead be Frau Orange? If so a new term of endearment for her has been acquired.

[fraurosena]

Just now, 47of74 said:

Wait a sec.

Question: Instead of Mrs. Herr Orange should it instead be Frau Orange? If so a new term of endearment for her has been acquired.

It's Frau Orange.  

Definitely not to be confused with my alias, despite the frau part (which is purely coincidental and not pronounced the same) and despite me coming from a country with orange as its national colour. 

[thoughtful]

I don't like to snark on looks, but I will snark on what people do to themselves. And I find it amusing (and sad, since she originally had lovely eyes and a nice figure) that she's spent so much money to purposely make herself look like the bad ladies in Eddie Corbett's comic books:

 

[Flossie]

59 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

I don't like to snark on looks, but I will snark on what people do to themselves. And I find it amusing (and sad, since she originally had lovely eyes and a nice figure) that she's spent so much money to purposely make herself look like the bad ladies in Eddie Corbett's comic books:

 

My how times have changed.  Today, Eddie's father would have said:

"Comic books are made up stories, and the people who make them have to tell their stories fast.  To move things along, they often use made up clues to help their readers know who's bad and who's good.  It makes you say 'Hey, that's a bad person!  Don't listen to them!  Don't trust them!'  The hero almost always doesn't figure it out until later in the story, but you're reading and worrying about them, and when they finally realize who the bad people are, you feel good.  All the bad people go to jail, and you feel smart for spotting the bad guys early on.

In the cowboy stories, the bad men always wear black cowboy hats, and the good guys always wear white hats.  But in the real old west, people bought the best hat they could afford, and the one that fit them the best.  They didn't go into a store and say "I'm a bad guy, I need to see your black hats."

In the comic books you're talking about, someone decided that all their bad or mean ladies have skinny eyes and big busts.  That's not true in real life.  We don't become good or bad because of our bodies.  How a person behaves is a result of lots of things.  Their natural personality, the things that have happened to them during life, what they were taught by their parents while growing up.  It all adds up to make people the way they are.

If you met a new boy at school and you really liked him, what would happen when you met his mother for the first time?  Say she drove up in her car to pick him up from school, and she had skinny eyes.  Would you ask her to get out of the car so you could see if she also had a big bust?  Would you decide you didn't want to be friends with this boy because of his mother's eyes and bust?

What if other kids looked at you and decided that they didn't want to be your friends because of the way you or I looked?  Wouldn't you think they were being unfair?  Wouldn't you want them to talk to you and get to know you before deciding if they wanted to be friends?

You shouldn't judge people by their looks.  Real people who look like the bad people in your comics might be very nice, and real people who look like the good people in your comics might not be very good."

[smittykins]

OT:  I didn’t know The Courtship of Eddie’s Father was originally a movie.  I clicked on it and thought, “Wait a minute, that’s totally not Bill Bixby and Brandon Cruz.”

[47of74]

Frau Orange has unveiled this year’s Christmas theme.

Patriotism is the theme of Christmas at the White House this year.

Melania Trump announced “The Spirit of America” as the theme in a late Sunday tweet that included a minute-long video of the Christmas decorations being unveiled Monday.

The Samuel Johnson line about patriotism being “the last refuge of the scoundrel” comes to mind here. (Though scoundrel is too nice a term for either Herr or Frau Orange).

[Gobsmacked]

Well. Much better than last years Gilead/muppet Christmas special theme. Why is she wearing her coat?  Has Trumpy  McFuckface spent  the heating allowance on his Thanksgiving weekend Golfing trip?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love this take from the WaPo fashion section: "Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations are lovely, but that coat looks ridiculous"

Spoiler

First lady Melania Trump unveiled this year’s White House Christmas decorations in a gauzy video in which she strolls through the public rooms marveling at their holiday luster. She gingerly adjusts a single red rose in a lush floral swag draped over a mantelpiece and delicately sprinkles glittery faux snow on one of the many white-decorated trees. The theme this year is “The Spirit of America,” and the dominant color is wintry white with festive bursts of holiday red. It’s all quite lovely. So there’s that.

For her tour, Mrs. Trump wears all white: a dress with a simple jewel neckline, white stiletto-heeled pumps and a white coat. The coat is draped over her shoulders as she strolls through the White House.

The coat looks ridiculous.

But more than a silly fashion folly, the coat is a distraction. It’s a discomforting affectation taken to a ludicrous extreme. In a video that is intended to celebrate the warmth and welcoming spirit of the holiday season, that simple flourish exudes cold, dismissive aloofness.

As Trump gazes pleasantly at all that her staff and a host of volunteers have accomplished, her attire suggests that she’s casually passing through and has little affinity for the occasion. She’s not getting comfortable, so why should you?

She has styled herself in a manner that contradicts what her staff has so often insisted — that she is an engaged hostess who sweats the details and frets about her guests’ comfort. Instead, she looks like the sort of host who greets her guests at the front door, tells them to remove their shoes and warns them not to sit on the Lalanne sheep.

The coat tossed over the shoulders is a generic styling maneuver. It’s often used in editorial photographs so that a model can show off the entirety of an ensemble, including what’s underneath the coat, because all of it has been thoughtfully coordinated. But even the most devoted fashion stylist realizes that at a certain point, when aesthetics start to overwhelm logic, when a flourish becomes a cliche, it’s time to retire it. For Trump, the cliche seems to be a crutch — a way of not having to be fully present.

The first lady doesn’t speak in the 2019 video. To a soundtrack of jingling bells and sprightly piano tinkling, Mrs. Trump glides silently through the White House summoning our attention with her gestures. She’s seen mostly at an angle and from a distance, and there’s never a moment when she looks at the viewer straight on. There’s not an intimate moment. She is all body language and aesthetics.

Except for her footwear, Trump appears to be wearing the same ensemble she had on when she, the president and their son, Barron, arrived at Joint Base Andrews on Sunday evening after their Thanksgiving trip to Mar-a-Lago. Over the weekend, she had tweeted that volunteers were “hard at work” decorating the “People’s House” and that she looked forward to viewing their handiwork when she returned to Washington. And when she did get a peek at it — one that was for public consumption — she had the look of someone who had swooped in on the way from here to there.

Trump is alone in her video walkabout except for a single scene when she examines the traditional gingerbread house and one can see two figures in chef’s toques standing in the background. She is the mistress of the house inspecting the work of others.

The coat-over-the-shoulders is a repeat from the 2018 video in which Trump viewed the White House decorations while wearing a dark overcoat that she alternately wore buttoned up with her hands slipped into a pair of red leather gloves, and tossed over her shoulders with the gloves clutched in her bare hands. To be clear, Trump was not viewing the decorations outside the White House. She was wrapped in the warm embrace of modern heating as she walked 2018′s gantlet of red trees. In the 2017 video, Mrs. Trump wears multiple coats: red for a bow-making exercise and navy plaid for conferring with chefs. Her lips move in the video but the only sound is the swelling orchestral music in the background.

Trump is keen on coats. In 2018, she used the graffiti on the back of a Zara coat to deliver the fashion equivalent of machine gunfire to all who caught a glimpse of it when she made a trip to visit detained migrant children: “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” Last week, when she spoke to students in Baltimore on the opioid crisis, she wore a brown trench coat buttoned up to her neck, giving it the look of a fencing jacket. She did not look at ease in the situation — and who could blame her after the president had insulted the city as “rodent infested” and “filthy?” Trump, who was booed, resembled a woman who pays a visit to someone’s home and refuses their invitation to “have a seat” because she suspects the chair might be soiled.

Trump rarely delivers long, formal speeches. In the realm of politics, her casual remarks are notably brief. She is most voluble using the language of aesthetics. She has asked that she be judged on what she does rather than what she wears. But as both a host and a guest, her attire would be less attention-grabbing if she took off her coat and indicated that she was happy to stay a while.

 

[JMarie]

13 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Frau Orange has unveiled this year’s Christmas theme.
 

 

The Samuel Johnson line about patriotism being “the last refuge of the scoundrel” comes to mind here. (Though scoundrel is too nice a term for either Herr or Frau Orange).

 

So there's a few American flags, a smattering of red (Native Americans), no brown or black (Latinx or African Americans), and overwhelmingly white (Caucasians). Just the way they envision the United States.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Alisamer]

On December 2, 2019 at 7:27 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

She has asked that she be judged on what she does rather than what she wears.

The problem with that is that Melania is really obviously out of her league, and appears to be compensating for that by cosplaying as whatever she thinks is correct for what she's doing. She's showing off Christmas ornaments, it's cold at Christmas, so she puts on a coat. (Or hangs one off her shoulders anyway - something that sort of makes sense in a fashion photoshoot but nowhere else.) She goes to Africa, so she dresses in a sort of colonial era "going on a safari" outfit. For the inauguration she cosplayed as Jackie Kennedy. Send her on an official trip to Harry Potter land at Universal, and I wouldn't be surprised if she cosplayed as Narcissa Malfoy. 

We have almost nothing to go on other than what she wears, since she does so little.

Also, I don't get the Republican flailing about someone so much as daring to mention Barron's name in a generic way. No one was dragging him into anything. Way to grasp at any straw as a distraction!

[GreyhoundFan]

28 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

Also, I don't get the Republican flailing about someone so much as daring to mention Barron's name in a generic way. No one was dragging him into anything. Way to grasp at any straw as a distraction!

Exactly. It's not like the absolute hate that many flung at 13 year old Chelsea Clinton when her father was elected. I remember SNL using Chris Farley to portray her. That made me angry. I liked Farley in other things, but impersonating a child was and is sick. Yesterday's mention of Barron's name was not an attack on him, it was simply pointing out his father's screwed up existence.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Melania Trump’s indefensible defense of her bully husband"

Spoiler

There is a classic dodge that bullies can be relied to fall back on when they abuse someone who is smaller and weaker than they are.

He (or she) asked for it.

First lady Melania Trump, it appears, subscribes to that defense of the indefensible as well.

A day after her husband mocked a 16-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with a disorder that is on the autism spectrum, the White House attempted to square President Trump’s appalling behavior with his wife’s supposed advocacy against bullying. It also asked us to pretend we didn’t see the obvious hypocrisy in the president’s attack on climate activist Greta Thunberg only a week after the first lady expressed outrage at a law school professor who had the temerity to make a play on words with the name of the Trumps’ 13-year-old son, Barron.

What, people wondered, did Melania Trump think of the president’s tweet?

Now we know. There is a lot to unpack in this four-sentence statement that White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued Friday afternoon: “BeBest is the First Lady’s initiative, and she will continue to use it to do all she can to help children. It is no secret that the President and First Lady often communicate differently — as most married couples do. Their son is not an activist who travels the globe giving speeches. He is a 13-year-old who wants and deserves privacy.”

Let us all agree that the last sentence is absolutely correct, and we should give the president’s youngest child some space. After Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan invoked his first name to make a pun during her recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, she recognized her mistake and apologized.

Everything else in Grisham’s statement is offensive. Trump was not communicating “differently” Thursday, when he tweeted to his 67.5 million followers that Thunberg “must work on her Anger Management problem.” He was melting down in his own fit of rage over her selection as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Nor was Trump airing his differences with her over the issue of climate change. He was calling attention to her demeanor. Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Those who have this condition often do not express their emotions as others do.

But the worst part of all of it is the suggestion that, somehow, Thunberg brought this act of aggression by the most powerful man in the world upon herself. That by speaking up about an issue that she sees as an existential one for her generation, this teen has forfeited any expectation of being treated with decency.

Is this really the “best” that Melania Trump believes that we can be?

 

[smittykins]

I didn’t know that Greta has Asperger’s.

[GreyhoundFan]

My eyes rolled so hard I thought they'd get stuck in the back of my head:

 

[SPHASH]

Melanoma is a twat. The previous FLOTUS deserves to win that award.  Did I mention Melanoma is a twat. 

Edited January 12, 2020 by SPHASH
ETA

[GreyhoundFan]

 

I think that dress is fugly.

[SPHASH]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

I think that dress is fugly.

So is the person wearing it

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Palm Beach Atlantic University: less than 4,000 students (including grad students) , 95% acceptance rate, ranked #293 in the US. Academics can't be the reason why she was picked, since she's a college dropout.  No, that can't be it.  Maybe it's the location? (putting on my thinking cap) Palm Beach, Palm Beach, it must have something to do with the location, but what....

[front hugs > duggs]

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

Palm Beach Atlantic University: less than 4,000 students (including grad students) , 95% acceptance rate, ranked #293 in the US. Academics can't be the reason why she was picked, since she's a college dropout.  No, that can't be it.  Maybe it's the location? (putting on my thinking cap) Palm Beach, Palm Beach, it must have something to do with the location, but what....

A guy that I dated in high school went there. He was homeschooled throughout high school, but I never really put two and two together. He was a surfer, and I just assumed he wanted to be in Palm Beach at a school that anyone could get into because he wasn't the MOST intelligent. His best friend went to Liberty and his brother went to Patrick Henry and got involved in conservative politics.

After lurking and then joining at FJ, I actually read their student handbook or whatever and realized this is a Christian school- curfew in dorms, no sex or drinking on campus, etc. PBA would definitely be a MAGA breeding ground. I'm not surprised at all that she would visit.

[GreyhoundFan]

I miss having a first lady who isn't a twit:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

My eyes are rolling:

Some of the replies are priceless:

Spoiler

 

 

[AmericanRose]

Well, I haven't heard of her doing anything awful (except that cringey 'Be Best' thing that went nowhere) but... what has she done for our country? Outside of being conventionally attractive?