Melania Trump One-Ups Her Hurricane Stilettos With an “I Really Don’t Care” Jacket, Worn Visiting Children at the Border
Melania Trump has given the world another baffling sartorial moment from her outrageously unaware crisis wardrobe: On her way to visit children at the border in McAllen, Texas, some orphaned from their parents by her husband’s zero tolerance immigration policy, the First Lady was photographed wearing a $39 green Zara jacket that says, in huge white lettering, “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” Less than a year after making headlines with python Manolo Blahnik stiletto heels, which she donned to visit another group of Texans, those stranded by the destruction of Hurricane Irma, it’s unclear what reason she could possibly find to wear a garment with such a message to the Upbring New Hope Children’s Shelter, where some 55 children live in citizenship limbo.
You could say the jacket’s message is a fitting metaphor for the First Lady’s attempts at softening some of the president’s more brutal and unpopular policies, in that it completely undermines them. From her anti-bullying platform to the aforementioned trip to Houston, Melania’s lackluster gestures at offering herself as a more empathetic White House fixture than her husband have consistently fallen short of any meaningful action. Even her reported misgivings about the policy of separating children from their parents at the border, which the president said influenced his decision to sign an executive order ending the protocol, have only superficially landed: Thousands of children are still separated from their parents, with no plans yet announced to reunite them, and the latest border policy will hold families, though together, indefinitely in detention centers, an equally nightmarish prospect. Only a day ago, Donald Trump used the word “infest” to refer to migrants crossing the border, many of them seeking asylum.
Melania is an immigrant herself, having come to the United States on an “Einstein visa” (for people with “extraordinary ability”) from Slovenia as a model then with a Camel cigarette ad in Times Square. “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” neatly sums up the apathy that many feel both Ivanka and Melania Trump display underneath rhetoric that positions themselves as public figures that see themselves first as wives and mothers.
Though she removed the jacket before disembarking from the plane in Texas, appearing at a press conference at the shelter in a white safari jacket, it seems hard to believe that the First Lady could have missed the enormous statement on the back of her jacket, or that she could have missed the implication it would have during her visit to McAllen. Perhaps the Zara item was a stylist’s attempt to pre-empt criticism, as with her python heels, that Melania’s expensive ensembles when visiting traumatized people is uncouth (though the down-home reliability of mall streetwear is mitigated by the jacket’s Marie Antoinette–esque millennial-speak message).“This was 100 percent her idea. She absolutely wanted to come,” a spokesperson said of her trip south—but what about the jacket? Another spokesperson in an additional statement said, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.” It was certainly not hidden—it was literally emblazoned on her back. In this rather leaky White House, it seems just as likely that an assistant with an agenda could have held out the jacket, with the back hidden, with the intent to show the administration’s true, ugly colors.
