{"id":575,"date":"2024-11-11T09:31:10","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T09:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/melania-trump-and-usha-vance-are-exactly-who-they-seem-to-be\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T09:31:10","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T09:31:10","slug":"melania-trump-and-usha-vance-are-exactly-who-they-seem-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/melania-trump-and-usha-vance-are-exactly-who-they-seem-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Melania Trump and Usha Vance are exactly who they seem to be"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Who, exactly, is Melania Trump<\/a>? Since the sphinx-eyed former model came onto the political scene alongside her husband, former President Donald Trump, she\u2019s been something of an enigma: often seemingly apolitical and largely silent<\/a>, with opaque motivations. She clearly doesn\u2019t believe Trump\u2019s politics were a deal-breaker \u2014 after all, she remains married to the guy. But she didn\u2019t exactly seem enthusiastic about being in the political crosshairs, either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The former first lady\u2019s very short memoir<\/a>, with an all-black cover interrupted only by \u201cMELANIA\u201d printed in neat white block letters, promised to offer some insight \u201cinto the life of a remarkable woman who has navigated challenges with grace and determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, no such insight is offered. It is a difficult book to remark on, because it contains nothing remarkable. This is a book you can judge by its cover. \u201cMelania\u201d isn\u2019t just boring; it\u2019s a void.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is a book you can judge by its cover. \u201cMelania\u201d isn\u2019t just boring; it\u2019s a void. <\/p>\n

Perhaps Melania is, too. Journalists have tried to profile her, interviewing friends<\/a> and family members and even people she grew up with<\/a>, trying to find anyone who can help them decode this cipher. But Melania may be more stick figure than hieroglyphic; there seems to be no complex code to crack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Melania is exactly who she seems to be: a beautiful woman who has spent a long time trying to be beautiful, who found a rich man to take care of her. She loves her son, Barron,<\/a> and her parents (her mother recently passed away). She likes expensive clothes and other luxuries. She may not be an aggressively cruel person like her husband, but she doesn\u2019t seem to be an ardently compassionate one, either.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that would be all fine and good had she stayed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her wealthy if boorish and allegedly philandering husband<\/a>. But Trump\u2019s foray in politics has dragged her in, too, and her decision to stand by his side (even if she didn\u2019t go to the trial <\/a>stemming from his alleged dalliance with porn star Stormy Daniels<\/a> during their marriage) is at the very least a symbol of her acceptance of his vulgarities and goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She did get some headlines \u2014\u00a0good and bad \u2014\u00a0for using her memoir to voice public support for abortion rights <\/a>just weeks before an election in which abortion is one of her husband\u2019s weaker issues. But this, too, seems less a statement of true independence and more one of cynical political game-playing \u2014 her husband needs to rope in more female voters, and many women are angry that he appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this sense, perhaps Melania and Donald aren\u2019t so different. Neither are politically sophisticated or particularly attentive to policy. Neither evince much in the way of compassion or even interest in other people. Trump is angry and vitriolic, while Melania is purse-lipped and stoic; he is emotionally incontinent, while she often appears to be in emotional rigor mortis; he is behaviorally uninhibited<\/a> and says whatever he wants, while she is studiously reserved, perhaps because she has very little to say. But with both Trumps, what you see is what you get: There\u2019s just not all that much there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Vances \u2014 JD, who is running for vice president, and Usha, who would be the second lady \u2014 are far more fascinating. But they, too, may be more transparent than the public would hope.<\/p>\n

Journalist Irin Carmon has a compelling profile of Usha Vance<\/a> in The Cut, and it sketches out a woman who on her face seems ill-suited for the role of political spouse to a MAGA maniac.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Usha is the high-achieving daughter of highly educated immigrant parents, who married a man whom she academically outperformed and who was attracted to her intelligence; JD even reportedly considered taking her last name and being the primary caregiver for their kids. Now, he\u2019s a different kind of guy, one who rails against childless cat ladies<\/a> and, as Carmon writes, \u201crefer[s] to his children as belonging to Usha\u201d (\u201cShe\u2019s got three kids,\u201d he recently said on a New York Times podcast).<\/p>\n

Vance, Carmon writes, \u201coften describes Usha as a \u2018working mother\u2019 without implying that he himself has anything to juggle. He has come a long way from the would-be stay-at-home dad who put his wife\u2019s career first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Usha Vance has clerked for conservative judges, including federal appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, and Chief Justice John Roberts, but she doesn\u2019t seem particularly conservative (or political) herself. JD Vance once compared Trump to Hitler <\/a>and voiced his respect for ambitious women; now he\u2019s Trump\u2019s highest-level lackey and mocks professional women who delay or \u2014\u00a0for whatever reason \u2014 don\u2019t end up giving birth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

JD Vance once compared Trump to Hitler and voiced his respect for ambitious women; now he\u2019s Trump\u2019s highest-level lackey.<\/p>\n

After he graduated from law school, Vance did a little bit of time in the world of corporate law before moving into bigger-money venture capital. While there, he published a finger-wagging memoir about his working-class Appalachian roots<\/a>, writing about rural America in a way that appealed to moneyed coastal conservatives who wanted to believe that the poor and miserable immiserated themselves. (While the book garnered plenty of bipartisan praise, leftists, it\u2019s worth pointing out, were some of the harshest critics of \u201cHillbilly Elegy.\u201d<\/a>) When he decided to run for the Senate in Ohio, he was barely living in the state and had to quickly rebrand as a real working-class man \u2014 and one sympathetic to the MAGA movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Usha hasn\u2019t adopted many of the aesthetics of the MAGA female, but she has quit her job, joined her husband on the campaign and stood by her man even as he demeans the sort of smart, well-educated, ambitious female archetype she very recently embodied.<\/p>\n

The public wants the people in high office \u2014 and most people in the public eye, whether they are in politics or are celebrities of another kind \u2014 to have depth. We want them to be decipherable, but we want to believe they are special. When they seem insubstantial or fueled by some silly and transparent motivation, we may assume there\u2019s something they\u2019re obscuring. If they\u2019re at the top of their game, then there must be something<\/em> there, right?<\/p>\n

Maybe with these four \u2014 the Trumps and the Vances \u2014 that\u2019s simply assuming too much. Perhaps they are exactly who they appear to be: The Trumps are superficial, intellectually shallow and money-obsessed; the Vances have principles that seemingly bend to their grand ambitions. All four of these people have had enough time to show the public who they are. I suspect that what we see is exactly what we get.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/span>Jill Filipovic<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Jill Filipovic is a journalist and the author of “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind” and “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Who, exactly, is Melania Trump? Since the sphinx-eyed former model came onto the political scene alongside her husband, former President Donald Trump, she\u2019s been something of an enigma: often seemingly apolitical and largely silent, with opaque motivations. She clearly doesn\u2019t believe Trump\u2019s politics were a deal-breaker \u2014 after all, she remains married to the guy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}