Melania Trump Lives in New York—Not With Her Husband
And we’ll prove it in court.
A presidential marriage is a relationship we largely scrutinize in a political rather than a personal context. How does the wife support her husband’s goals? If she does this with spirit and savviness, it’s a successful marriage. Given all that’s required of both candidate and his wife to become president—and then actually winning—we assume that the couple’s bond is even mostly real. And, if it’s not, if it’s a pretend bond, with all ritual and propriety observed, we’re mostly ready to accept that too.
It’s a wholly new experience and challenge for the body politic when a presidential marriage seems indifferent to politics and to pretense—when husband and wife not only have openly separate lives but divergent goals. In some sense, it just seems embarrassing for the nation, so we turn away. And, in the case of the Trumps, it’s simply too exhausting to challenge yet one more reality inversion. In Trumpian fashion, we overlook what’s in front of our face.
