From 2017: Take it from Khrushchev's granddaughter: Melania Trump is the perfect autocrat's wife
By Nina Khrushcheva March 3, 2017
There are many institutions of democracy that US president Donald Trump has attempted to undermine during his short time in office, including the judiciary and the independent press. He is governing by Twitter and by decree, like the budding autocrat he is.
As a former Soviet, I recognize these symbols of creeping authoritarianism. A first post-Soviet “tsar” of Russian democracy, Boris Yeltsin also chaotically ruled by decree, arguing that communists would undermine him and painting himself as the lone hero of the new Russia. Trump, who is eager to go it alone in his quest for the parochial and reactionary “America First,” fights not communism, but liberal democracy, with its foundations of shared responsibility.
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In this White House, however, Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka has been more prominently featured than Melania. Appearing with his wife in public, just like the patriarchal types of the old, Trumps shows little affection—rare holding hands or making other small gestures. The Trumps’ seemingly cool relationship presents no “sense of the person behind Melania’s Slavic mask.” Some say that this exported fashion model from Eastern Europe is “scared”; others suggest “she doesn’t want to be there” at all. All of this is projection. What is clear is that Melania’s role in the White House is to follow her master’s plan—to serve as a kept woman with a perfect posture, a poster image, a magazine cover, a billboard display.
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The spectacularly fit Michelle Obama’s highly visible focus on health encouraged Americans to exercise and eat well; it prompted her husband to stop smoking and set an example for the nation. Hillary Clinton, filled with her own political ambition, brought discipline and force to her husband’s meandering and seductive style of leadership. To mark the new era of civil rights, Rosalynn Carter pointedly sat in on her husband’s Cabinet meetings. Jacqueline Kennedy, a fashion icon married to the most charming man on earth, famously redecorated the White House.
And so Melania’s strikingly nonexistent White House life marks a dramatic departure from the institutional rules of American democracy—one of many such departures that have increasingly become the unfortunate hallmarks of this new administration. The position of the first lady, as Rebecca Mead notes in the New Yorker, is “inherently retrogressive.” But other presidential wives have tried to make the best of the role. Melania does not have such agency, precisely because this is a White House that does not value women at all.
https://qz.com/915988/take-it-from-khrushchevs-granddaughter-melania-trump-is-the-perfect-autocrats-wife/
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This is a fascinating, insightful, and frighteningly dead-on.
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