The first lady hasn’t said a word about cyber bullying since her husband took office
After video footage surfaced of her husband bragging about sexually assaulting women, Melania Trump contributed to damage control efforts by sitting down to an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Over the course of the conversation, she defended Donald Trump as being a precocious 59-year-old boy victimized by Billy Bush and the left-wing media. In an added effort to distract, Melania pledged to tackle the epidemic that is cyberbullying. You’re familiar with cyberbullying, right? It’s exactly that thing where the man you married gets up at 3am to call people “fat pigs,” “stupid” and — irony alert! — “liars” on Twitter.
Here’s what Melania actually said while keeping a completely straight face during the interview:
My passion is the same [as I’ve said in the past]: helping children and helping women. And also, I see now in 21st century, the social media, it’s very damaging for the children. We need to guide them and teach them about social media, because I see a lot of negativity on it, and we need to help them. It has some positive effects as well, because this is the life that we live in now. But has a lot of negativity as well. And I see more and more children being hurt by it . . . A lot of bullying.
Melania revisited this topic again during a rare appearance on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania. In her address, she bemoaned how “our culture has gotten too mean and too rough” and suggested Americans — without using specific names like, say, Donald — “have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other.”
“We must find better ways to honor and support the basic goodness of our children, especially in social media,” Melania concluded in a speech Michelle Obama probably delivered somewhere first. “It will be one of the main focuses of my work if I’m privileged enough to become your First Lady.”
Despite anti-cyberbullying work being a “passion” of hers, Melania did nothing to tackle the issue once her husband took office. In early May, USA Today reached out to “leaders and activists in anti-cyberbullying efforts” to see how things were going, but found that “neither Trump nor her East Wing staff [had] reached out, nor have they responded to offers to help.” Melania’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said her boss had been spending all those months thinking really hard about what she wanted to do.
This is mild comic relief for Trump resisters, however distracting, but who said a first lady can’t squander her leverage? A famous Time magazine report in Washington when Eisenhower was president said that while Ike greeted dignitaries in the rose garden, “Mamie sat tight in the White House.” (Hic.)