Media Go from Michelle O. Worship to Melania T. Snark

First lady Melania Trump’s move to D.C. has attracted a great deal of interest in the Washington media — but also plenty of snark, and worse.

Politico, in a story last week, was blatantly hostile, referring to Melania’s parents, who’ve been living with her and Barron in the enormous Trump Tower apartment, as “hyperinvolved” and describing Melania as “aloof” and as the often “stiff-in-her-role” first lady.

The only nice things the writer wrote about the first lady were backhanded compliments that hit at the president, along the lines of hopes that Melania would “even out some of the president’s tantrums.”

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Mainstream journalists have never written anything remotely like this about Michelle Obama.

The coverage of Michelle Obama over the past eight years, in fact, has been nearly worshipful.

“To the first lady, with love” was the headline on the story in The New York Times on Oct. 17, 2016, which featured an enormous, half-screen photo of Michelle Obama with stick-straight hair and sculpted eye brows, looking upward, proud and slightly defiant. The piece contained four “love letters” to Michelle Obama, who, the Times said, had “spent the past eight years quietly and confidently changing the course of American history.”

A Jan. 14 piece in the Sunday Styles section of The Times, written by fashion editor Vanessa Friedman, was similarly gushing, saying Michelle Obama’s “significance as a contemporary role model goes far beyond her image” but that “no one understood the role of fashion, and the potential uses of it, better than Michelle Obama.”

But The Times was surpassed in its praise of Michelle Obama by The Washington Post, whose fashion writer, remarked Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, covered the first lady as though she were a close member of her own family.

That writer, Robin Givhan, wrote in 2009 that Michelle Obama is “a symbol of middle-class progress, feminist achievement, affirmative action success, and individual style.”

But the praise was heaped higher still.

“Time and again,” Givhan wrote, “observers grasp for adjectives to describe Obama’s combination of professional accomplishment and soccer-mom maternalism. It’s no wonder so many eye her with awe and disbelief.”

Michelle Obama was lauded again and again, and she appeared on the cover of Vogue, America’s premier fashion magazine, on three occasions.

A writer for ESPN recently wrote that Michelle Obama’s face should be carved into Mount Rushmore. The writer didn’t appear to be joking.

In truth, Michelle Obama was not known as a stylish person before becoming the first lady, and though she was often well-dressed as a first lady (as one might expect when one has a coterie of stylists), she also had some very bad fashion moments. She was the only first lady ever to walk off Air Force One dressed in shorts and running shoes, for example, and was criticized for it online by many Americans who considered it inappropriate and disrespectful of the position.

She’d gotten a not-great start to her term as first lady at President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago in 2008, when she wore a black dress with large patches of bright red at the chest and in the skirt.

“I voted for Obama, but I didn’t vote for that dress,” said a woman named Jessica Bettencourt of Mequon, Wisconsin, who was quoted in a New York Times blog, but with the Times writer next rushing in to add that the choice of the dress represented a “rare” lapse in taste.

But many Americans seemed to pay more attention to Mrs. Obama’s facial expressions, noting that she often seemed to have an unamused scowl on her face. Perhaps her own words give a glimpse of the reason for that scowl, such as when she said in a speech in Madison, Wisconsin, in February 2008 that that she was proud of her country “for the first time” in her adult life.

Enter Melania.

A former professional model, Melania Trump has what The New York Times would refer to — if she were a Democrat — as “classic proportions.”

From the very start, her fashion choices have been extraordinary, and most Americans will forever have etched in their minds the image of her in the baby blue cashmere Ralph Lauren dress, with short matching jacket, with matching gloves and heels, with her brown hair swept up just so, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue next to the president in the Inaugural Parade, smiling and waving at the crowd.

There are many things that professional fashion writers might write about Melania Trump if politics didn’t get in their way. They might write about her natural grace and body awareness, her smile, her sense of the moment, as when she appeared at a dinner in Saudi Arabia in a magenta gown with long, flowing cape. It was a startling image — so refined, so modern, and yet … Arabian!

They might write how she seems aware of the power of beauty and the power of images, and aware of the power she wields as a beautiful woman, while able to focus outside of herself, treating others with deep compassion, as when she visited a children’s hospital in Rome, speaking to the children in Italian.

But it doesn’t appear as though they will.

Following the foreign trip, The New York Times style section refused to put Melania on the front of the section — choosing instead a photograph of a high school journalist sitting on his bed, staring at his laptop — and relegated her to Page 10, a left-hand page. The photos of Melania in the various outfits worn on the world stage were so small you had to squint to see them. The headline? “Melania Trump on Display, Dressed in Ambivalence and Armor.”

The Times wrote that the outfits Melania had worn had a “rigidity of line” and “militaristic mien” and asked for what battle she might be preparing.

It’s pretty clear to many readers what battle that might be: the battle she’ll fight with the Washington media for fair coverage.

The only journalists to give an honest assessment of the new first lady, it seems, have been foreign journalists. In November, The Indian Express, published in New Delhi, raved about Melania’s fashion choices, especially the white Roksanda “Margot” dress that she wore in the speech at the Republican National Convention, saying “her sartorial best is yet to come” and that “the Americans might just have got their most glamorous first lady yet.”