Donald Trump took the stage in Wisconsin on Monday night, hitting his now-familiar end-of-campaign themes: the election is rigged, the media is dishonest, House Speaker Paul Ryan is out to get him.
Meanwhile, Melania Trump, the candidate’s press-shy third wife, was at home in their gold-crusted triplex atop a Fifth Avenue building that bears her last name, though she was in much less familiar territory. She was answering a series of serious but kindly asked questions thrown at her by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape in which her husband is heard boasting about groping women and trying to bed married women while she was pregnant with her son, and the deluge of women alleging that Donald had sexually assaulted them over the span of two decades.
With three weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump needed his wife’s help. His poll numbers have slipped, the narrative has turned, and any momentum he had has halted. Other than a few appearances at debates, Melania has been a ghost on the campaign trail over the last few months. After the mess this summer over her address at the Republican National Convention—portions of which were lifted from an earlier convention speech delivered by __Michelle Obama—Melania has not sat down for an interview and has rarely been heard from at all. That’s not to say that she has been completely silent. Melania did put out a statement in the days following the tape’s release asserting that her husband’s words were wrong, but that she accepted his apology and hoped the American people would, too. Her lawyer sent a letter to People magazine last week, picking apart one piece of a personal essay written by a woman who claimed Donald stuck his tongue down her throat and told her they were going to have an affair while a pregnant Melania changed elsewhere in Melania and Donald’s Palm Beach mansion. (The letter took issue with a chance encounter between the People writer and Mrs. Trump, which Melania says never happened. This is undoubtedly the least critical portion of the essay, but it is clear that Melania’s underlying point was to discredit her, one insignificant fact at a time.)
She refused to sit down for a joint interview with her husband on the matter last week, even at the urging of the Trump campaign’s closest advisers, according to The New York Times. And on Monday night Melania made it clear that she is the one calling the shots about when she speaks out. “It was my decision not to be on the campaign trail. I don’t listen anybody about what to do, what to say, when to say it, when to do interviews,” she told Cooper. “For my husband or the campaign, they will have me on the trail all the time. They wish to have me there, but I made the decision. I will be a parent to our boy, to our child.”
Through a smile quite literally pulled tight across her face, she offered a full-throated defense of her husband’s words and denial that they had translated into action. “I believe my husband. I believe my husband,” she repeated. “This was all organized from the opposition. They don’t have any facts.”
Her several-pronged justification of her husband’s remarks to former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush was a bit harder to follow, but it boiled down to this: Bush egged her husband on to engage in “boy talk,” which was surprising to her because she’d never heard her husband talk that way and in no way did he act that way. They didn’t know that their microphones were on, and the media and Clinton campaign organized this to come out now in order to steal the election, she said.
“And as you can see from the tape, the cameras were on. It was only a mike. And I wonder if they even knew that the mike was on because they were kind of boy talk and he was lead on, like, egg on from the host to say dirty and bad stuff,” Melania said. “I heard many different stuff, boys’ talk. The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, Oh, this and that, and talking about the girls and—but, yes, I was surprised, of course.”
There are, of course, a number of issues with this defense. If Billy Bush, an entertainment host 25 years Trump’s junior, can egg him on to gloat about grabbing women's genitals, what can someone of actual influence or power or stature of any kind get him to do? How easy would it be for Vladimir Putin to get Trump to follow his lead in order to impress him? What about David Duke? It’s hard to make the case that this sphere of influence only applies to middling members of the celebrity press.
There’s also the matter of a calling someone who, as Cooper pointed out to Melania, at the time, was 59 years old, a “boy” engaging in “boy talk,” implying that boasting about sexual assault is something young kids regularly do and that her billionaire businessman of a husband had not matured beyond that. “Sometimes I said I have two boys at home. I have my young son and I have my husband,” she smiled. That line might have had many wives nodding their head at the television. Most of those wives, however, would also agree that their husbands aren’t qualified to be president for that same reason.
Her line about not knowing the microphones were on made no sense, either, since those comments shouldn’t have been made regardless of whether or not they were picked up.
But the primary problem with Melania’s defense was that she was giving a defense at all. Sure, political wives have done far more and far less. Huma Abedin speaking at a press conference to defend her husband after his sexting scandal comes to mind as perhaps more gutting. Her boss, Donald’s opponent, endured this kind humiliation for decades. She endured it onstage last week, in fact, as Donald trotted out Bill Clinton’s accusers and seated them in front of her at their second presidential debate.
These women, though, had their husbands beside them as they swallowed their pride and put on a good face for the good of their husbands’ ambitions. Donald, on the other hand, has left Melania alone, exposed and unsupported, to deal with the embarrassments he’s caused her throughout the campaign. He barely addressed the R.N.C. speech controversy, beyond tweeting out her statement and his campaign’s statement afterward. When questions about her immigration status were raised in the press, he promised that they would hold a press conference to address the issue. That press conference never happened. Melania herself has stood up for herself when it was reported that she had allegedly served as an escort, suing the Daily Mail and threatening a number of publications if they did not issue retractions and apologies.
It very well may be that Melania wants it this way. As she told Cooper, “I’m great. I’m very strong. I’m very confident and I live my life. I take care of myself.” And good on her for wanting to set the record straight on her own terms. It rings strange, though, that in order to show Donald’s softer side following the sexual-assault allegations, his wife has to appear without him.
Melania made it very clear that she’s capable of dealing with this. “I’m very strong. People, they don’t really know me. People think and talk about me, the—like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania.’ Don't feel sorry for me. Don't feel sorry for me.”
I still did, though, feel sorry. It’s hard to watch a woman do this on national television, blaming the media and the opposition and Billy Bush and Access Hollywood for her husband’s words and whatever pain this has caused her. It’s difficult to listen to her flip-flopping around under an unwanted spotlight, senselessly darting from defending her husband’s taped words because he sometimes acts like a teenage boy to defending his ability to tweet because he’s an adult. It’s not easy to see someone humiliated, even if they themselves don’t believe the allegations are true.
I stopped feeling sorry, though, when Cooper asked Melania if the behavior Donald described on the tape—grabbing a woman without consent because he was a “star”—would classify as sexual assault. “No. That’s not sexual assault,” she said, before talking about all the women who come onto her husband even though they know he’s married. It’s one thing to defend your husband, to believe his word publicly or privately, especially with 21 days until the election. It’s another to categorically deny that things that are sexual assault are sexual assault in the name of political expediency.
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