Wearing a jacket with the inscription, “I really don’t care,” Melania Trump bordered a plane yesterday headed to the border to visit children. Not surprisingly, it has provoked a good deal of discussion as to her intentions.
In an oped column in the NYT, Michele Goldberg writes, “It’s hard to tell whether incompetence or malevolence was behind her choice (of jacket’s inscription) … ” I have to believe she had malevolent intentions. To attribute it to incompetence is just too big a stretch for me anyway. She can’t be that tone deaf or stupid not to think that it wouldn’t be taken as a statement expressing her attitude toward the crisis at the border.
But of more importance than her intentions is s in Congress, how it was received by Trump’s loyalistapologists in the media, and diehard supporters at the grassroots. After all, they, like Trump, have must have felt on their heels in the face of an outraged country, reacting to the awful sight of children and babies forcibly separated from their parents.
In this context, it’s reasonable to think that Melania’s not so subtle message had the purpose of steadying this nasty coalition of white nationalists as well as reminding them that more harsh and extreme measures will be necessary at the border to protect their “way of life” from the growing “infestation” (Trump’s word) of “darker skinned” people crossing our southern border?