The Ice Queen of Palm Beach has melted.
Following the extraordinary events of Saturday evening, an assassination attempt on a former president, Melania Trump shared a uniquely emotive message of support for her injured husband.
Swapping out the six-inch stilettos for a feather-soft quill, Melania addressed her ‘fellow Americans’ in an open letter that painted a rarely considered picture of Donald J. Trump as a generous family man.
‘When I watched that violent bullet strike my husband, Donald, I realized my life, and Barron’s life, were on the brink of devastating change,’ she wrote.
‘A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration.’
(Love of music? I’m guessing Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA.’)
Then the former first lady ended her note with an elegant yet wide-eyed plea: ‘Ascend above the hate, the vitriol, and the simple-minded ideas that ignite violence.’
Yeah, good luck with that.
Trump hadn’t even wiped the blood from his mangled ear, before non-binary, jobless Gen-Zers were weeping over his would-be assassin’s poor aim.
‘Oh my f****** God, why couldn’t it have been 2 inches in, we would’ve never had to hear about him again!’ posted one imminently unemployable TikToker. Regardless, that video had earned nearly 200,000 likes by Sunday morning.
From there the insane bloodlust only spread from social media to popular culture and even the halls of Congress.
Less than 12 hours removed from the shooting, horror writer Stephen King thought it appropriate to blame the victim.
‘An AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle was used in the Butler shooting,’ he tweeted. ‘These are the guns the Republican party – and Trump – want to protect.’
King believes that someone who wants to defend 2nd Amendment rights deserves to be shot.
Who is the dangerous one now?
A Congressional staffer for Rep. Bennie Johnson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security which oversees the Secret Service, posted on Facebook: ‘I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time oops that wasn’t me talking.’
Johnson had the sense to immediately terminate the employment of his homicide-adjacent aide but that wasn’t guaranteed.
It was Johnson who tried to strip Trump of all Secret Service protection in the weeks before the attack. (Boy, that didn’t age well.)
By 48 hours after the attack, any sense of sympathy for Trump or recognition of what an assassination of a presumptive party nominee in the middle of an election would have done to the fabric of the nation was completely lost.
On Monday, CNN contributor and former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfield was urging Democrats to ‘turn their fire’ on Trump.
Then, cue the conspiracy theories!
On the second night of the Republican National Convention, MSNBC analyst Michael Steele was questioning whether Trump was injured at all.
‘It’s been three days, going on four, since this horrific event occurred,’ said Steele, ‘… and yet we’ve not received a medical report from the hospital, nor have we received a medical report from the campaign, or from the Trump organization about the extent of the damage to his ear.’
It’s Ear-Gate.
If I were Trump, I would repair my lobe and surgically enhance it with a middle finger as a reminder to all those who forgot about basic human decency.
Nearly everyone has lost their gosh darn minds – everyone except Melania Trump.
As first lady, she intentionally steered clear of the political fray – keeping a low profile on the campaign trail and in the White House. According to her husband, she ‘hates’ political life – and what ordinary person wouldn’t.
It’s quite a contrast with Dr. Jill Biden, who seems to revel in the nasty day-to-day fisticuffs.
‘We will lose all of our rights [if Trump is elected],’ she said on ABC News’ The View in May. ‘You have to believe him when he uses words like dictator, bloodbath, third term, violence,’ she ranted hysterically.
How very inciteful of you, Jill.
Of course, Melania’s reluctance to get down and dirty in the partisan mud didn’t insulate her from unhinged partisans.
They still seized on every opportunity to criticize her – whether it was over Christmas decorations or perceived fractures in her marriage. And the most vile among her critics even spread false smears about her son, Barron.
But that’s the reality of living in America today – and only the naive would even entertain the idea that the hyperbolic political rhetoric that’s fueling the crazies and upending Thanksgiving dinner tables everywhere can be flipped off with a switch.
That eyes-bulging, vein-popping, banshee-screeching partisan genie may never be shoved back into the bottle.
However, if there is anyone in the public today who has any business saying that it should – it is our Slovenian-born, ex-supermodel, former first lady.
I, for one, am looking forward to a possible Melania runaway appearance at the RNC on Thursday night – because if she speaks, it will be one of the only sane voices I’ve heard in some time.