In place of roses, the First Lady grew concrete. Prior to her address at the Republican National Convention, on Tuesday night, the White House unveiled Melania Trump’s renovations to the Rose Garden, which had been pitched as her personal project. Cultivation of the garden would link her to Jackie Kennedy, the one figure whose lineage Melania, and her boosters, can tenuously claim. Homage, to Melania, looked like draining the floriculture of its traditional crimson and magenta, replacing the garden’s formerly bright bushes with flowers of the palest shades, and removing the row of crab-apple trees around the perimeter, leaving a walkway of fresh pavement in their stead. If First Lady is an unofficial office whose only, and therefore critical, mandate is to rustle up symbolism, then Melania’s redesign was flawless: the content of the metaphor was clean and clear.
Drained of life, the garden now better functions as a stage. Cameras followed Melania as she strode into the garden, where she received movie-star lighting, to deliver her speech. So far, the production of the R.N.C. has emphasized scale—the single boasting figure at the dais in an empty hall, the wide frame a kind of implicit and defiant fuck-you to the pandemic’s constriction of space. In the Rose Garden, what looked like dozens of audience members, including Melania’s husband, as she would refer to the President, looked on from chairs. (According to reports, only the guests who sat near the President and Vice-President were tested for COVID-19.) Her olive-green skirt suit, by Alexander McQueen, looked rather like fatigues, and recalled the palette of her other famous jacket, with its quick message of fast-fashion fascism: “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?”
You know the thing about Melania by now. Profundity is wrung from her vapidity, messages decoded from the tea leaves of her rote silence. Belief in her moral grain, faith in the fable in which she is the innocent immigrant who has tumbled into an accursed set of circumstances, is, for some, the last thing standing in the way of full-on nihilism. The story of her R.N.C. address, then, is less about what streamed from the teleprompter than the trap it laid for the D.C. press. Already, the Washington Post has noted that Melania’s speech “emphasized her empathy, which only highlighted the president’s lack of it.”
Groping in the dark banality of the address, one can agree that Melania did provide a superficial counter to her husband. But one gets the sense that Melania Trump does not appreciate the custodial role. Generally emotionless throughout her twenty-six-minute address, she offered a careful appraisal of the state of the nation, admitting the “harsh reality” of “racial unrest in our country,” and extending sympathy to Americans who have lost loved ones and livelihoods to the pandemic. She also freely recalled her childhood in the Communist state of Slovenia, and even spoke, notionally, of Islam, all while her husband maintains his Muslim ban. The exploitative speech, like the Convention as a whole, was tasked with conjuring an alternative interpretation of Trumpian fascism. As she has before, Melania claimed her husband’s incivility to be a form of passionate patriotism. At the same time, she acted as a kind of quiet, maternal foil to the rest of the R.N.C.’s overactive bombast, with its vision of a world in which COVID-19 has been vanquished and the economy is roaring. Her delivery was shy, and the words did not seem fully processed or digested by their speaker. Still, it was by far Melania’s best political performance since her entrance into public life.
At this year’s R.N.C., the scions of the Trump family are no longer vehemently attesting to the character of the king, as they did at the 2016 Convention. The G.O.P. has produced instead a number of convincing “regular” women and people of color to exert that soft power, which is to say: the propaganda has grown more sophisticated. Take, for instance, the cheap eloquence of the Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron, a Black Republican who seems poised for a bright political future; his invocation of the death of Breonna Taylor might cause a viewer to forget that he is the figure who has declined to bring charges against her killers. When the Trump children do emerge, they are on the offense. In her short speech, Tiffany, dressed in Tiffany blue, claimed to know firsthand the uncertainty of young voters right now, marshalling her age and the fact that she recently graduated from law school as points of commonality. Eric Trump blared on about his father’s acumen; Donald Trump, Jr., on Monday night, was worse at hiding the desperation, resorting to a convoluted Loch Ness analogy to jab at his father’s opponent.
The G.O.P. is having to spin several disasters of the Presidency at the same time. The team behind the Convention includes former producers of “The Apprentice,” and they have resorted to some old tricks. The aesthetic of the week has alternated between fascist soap opera and fascist game show. The President is televising shows of fealty, making the White House his studio: the host invites in people who had formerly been held hostage, and they thank him profusely for freeing them. I had a physical reaction to the stunt of Trump pardoning a tearful Jon Ponder, a former felon who grew up believing that the police “were my enemy,” which aired two days after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a young Black father, seven times in the back. So, too, while watching the President host a naturalization ceremony, in which five grateful immigrants got their prize of citizenship. Of course, it is only ever Trump who wins.
In conjuring the image of herself as charitable First Lady, hopping the African continent to learn about the slave trade, Melania is playing that game, too, mirroring exactly her husband’s farce of magnanimity. As she tentatively maneuvered the topic of the nation’s unavoidable racism, proclaiming that our “diverse and storied history is what makes our country strong,” pundits online immediately produced the infamous interview, from 2011, of Melania questioning the birthplace of Barack Obama. It is easy, and also morally correct, to call out the First Lady’s special hypocrisy. What matters, of course, isn’t what I saw, or what the viewers on CNN or MSNBC saw, either.
