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Donald and Melania Trump Are Human, Too
With all the turmoil and conflict surrounding the Trump presidency and the Trump family, I have to wonder how Donald and Melania Trump are finding their way through it all. I have no idea what their marriage was like before the Presidency, but the stress must be enormous, especially with the constant attacks launched by the media.
So you can imagine my surprise at seeing a short CNN report while I was working out at my fitness club about the romantic dinners the Trumps have at Mar-a-Lago. I watched the entire piece, waiting for some kind of snark. There wasn’t any.
Apparently, Laurence Leamer, a part-time resident of Palm Beach, has written about their holidays:
Mr Leamer said: ‘What married couple spends three hours together alone at dinner? They’re there so long, other people are leaving and they’re just there.
‘They dine for hours. He likes a small table, a four-person table, so people can come over to say hello but there’s not enough room to invite people to join.’
A White House official confirmed Mr. Leamer’s account.
Gosh, who would have thought that the evil Donald Trump and his mysterious wife might actually like to talk to each other? That they might even like each other?
When was the last time you went out for a romantic, candlelit dinner and talked with your spouse alone for two to three hours?
Published in Culture
“Melania Trump Says the Lord’s Prayer at Florida Rally.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDmUy31B2Sw
The grace with which she spoke, and obvious humility she feels in leading the crowd in Christianity’s most sacred prayer, was so touching. My husband is a Eucharistic minister at our church so I know that there is nothing more humbling than leading people in prayer. It’s a true “Who, me, Lord? You’re kidding” moment. :-) It’s unnerving. As it should be.
She won me over, and anyone who criticizes her is a fool.
She may be regarded some day as the greatest first lady we have had or will ever have.
I lean toward unclassy, based on her hypocracy. Eating ribs while making school children eat soy burgers? Wearing thousand dollar clothes while bad-mouthing the extravagances of the rich?
Nope, just another lowbrow lefty . . .
That’s a very sweet post – they may be so discreet that no one noticed til now. Our night out if Friday – we’ve been doing it for years and years. If Friday gets messed up, we go for Saturday or Thursday. My husband looks forward to it. I can’t say we spend hours but enough time to relax, talk and chill after a busy week.
Especially here. How many people have been harassed for their clothing? How many businesses have been attacked because of the owner’s religious beliefs? How many people have been shut out of public discourse due to wrongthink?
I have also wondered how all this has affected their private life. Frankly, Melania is a better woman than I as there is no way I could calmly go through the agony of the constant attacks without wanting to chuck it all and go back to life before the presidency. She smiles a lot and is always beautifully dressed. Amazing woman.
I remember watching Hillary Clinton when all of Bill Clinton’s womanizing came out in the press with the worst being that he was actually recklessly doing it where they lived/worked with a very young intern. It would have served him right to see her pack her bags and hail a taxi on the front steps of the White House. Instead, her face showed misery and fury while she went about the business as first lady.
First ladies have the hardest job of all.
Susan, you always know what deserves a mention and how to mention it. Keep up the good work and have a happy Passover.
Thanks so much, @yehoshuabeneliyahu. And to you and your loved ones, too.
I teased my husband a little bit with your “challenge,” but he replied with the first thing I thought of, too: every Friday night, over Shabbat dinner. It’s not a perfect reply, since we often have a guest or guests, and I do the cooking (which I love–not the clean up after, though…). Still, it’s at least a couple of hours in conversation together over a, if I say so myself, very good meal. There are even candles ;-).
Still…one of our (few) incompatibilities is my fondness for fine dining and his preference for…well, let’s just call it sustenance.
Melania is Class with a Capital C, and I think she’s wonderful. Women do civilize men. The President married very well, and is to be commended.
Ray and I go out for dinner often. We each take the other out to our favorite place for birthday dinners, and have been doing so for the entire 17 years we have been together. Big one this weekend (my 70th), so Sunday will be Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra concert in the afternoon, and a nice dinner after.
Well, Happy Birthday, RushBabe! The 49 is now explained. Very best wishes for a lovely day and many, many returns.
It’s not, depending on the circumstances . . .
@susanquinn reminds us of our First Family’s humanity, then the comments proceed to remind us of ourselves.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the April 2019 Group Writing Theme: Men and Women. There are plenty of dates still available. Tell us about your favorite couple, witty or tragic observations between the sexes, or perhaps the battles and truces. Or do something entirely different. Maybe a musical or dance post! Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
May’s theme will be blossom midway through April’s showers.
Wow. I wonder what the redacted part was, if calling the president a Nazi was what didn’t get redacted.
And just last week someone here on Ricochet was asking me to provide proof that anyone had ever called Trump a Nazi. 🙄
Seriously? Make ’em google it. It’ll be easy to find. Thanks, Max.
Trump has made Big Pharma very happy lately, so we can all expect a lot more rosy portraits of the Trumps.
Big Pharma is the number one contributor to campaign chests owned by congress critters, even surpassing the amounts of money that the Big Energy companies donate.
And Big Pharma basically holds the networks hostage, by being the source of fifty percent of all advertising dollars to the TV stations.
So I keep suspecting that a somewhat recent decision by Trump to make drugs cheaper for Americans has fallen by the wayside.
If you have not yet read it “They Thought They Were Free” is a most amazing book that follows the progression of nice normal Germans into Hitlerian puppets in quite a remarkable fashion. It was written by Milton Mayer, a man who needed do research for his master’s degree at University of Chicago.
So it being the immediate post World War II period, he goes over to Germany. He reveals to no one that he is a Jewish German, by way of Chicago. He befriends local Germans in the region where he and his family are living. He records their remarks and their answers to his questions. Then he winnows down all the work he has done, to focus on just 10 normal individuals from inside the Third Reich.
The ten individuals run the gamut of “normal citizenry.” One is a man who actually helped Jewish people under threat to sneak out of the country. Another man is someone who let his passion for theories of “making a new Germany great” include persecuting the Jews.
It is very eye opening. I think one quote I remember the most is this: “If they had told us in the beginning exactly how it would be, no one would have gone along with the Third Reich’s programs. But they had us accept a new way of thinking and feeling by a single small step at a time, so in the end, when we finally were shown the gas ovens, & we realized what they had been used for, we could barely comprehend how we had gotten there.” (I am paraphrasing here, as it has been a while since I read the book, and all my copies of it got loaned to friends and not returned.)
I’ll have to defend Valiuth on this one. He didn’t call the president a Nazi, nor did he imply that he was. And it’s true, the Nazi’s often did have nice family lives. I just read a review of a recent book on that very topic. He just pointed out that the fact that he has a decent relationship with his wife doesn’t tell us much about him as a president.
I’ve had to make points like this when explaining my NeverBush position and in fending off attacks on Trump.
I’ve been using the same drug for some 25 years, from the same big Pharmaceutical Co. For years a I was paying between $25-$16 for a prescription, then a year ago it became $8.00. I pay for it out of pocket, because the drug insurances use a different company and I have bad reactions to it. Now, I’m not saying Trump had anything to do with the price being cut in half, however, I suspect he did.
I have a daughter who is on some real expensive stuff, for autoimmune, about $6,000 a shot. Last month it was dropped to about $3,000 a shot. So maybe some good stuff is happening because of our President Trump.
I saw that depicted in an Emmy award winning series on DVD, Holocaust. I don’t think this is news.
Actually, I must have been thinking about the scene at 43:00 of the linked episode where the Nazi officer and his family are at home with a guest and gathered around the piano on Christmas Day to sing Christmas songs. Your observation paints with too broad of a brush and adds nothing to the conversation.
Holy Cow! Fifty percent? There must just be a ton of drug ads that I’m not noticing. I see drug ads on TV, but with all those ads for auto and home insurance, soda, beer, cars & pickups, cell phones, restaurants, department stores, seed, fertilizer, herbicides (yes, I live in agriculture country), movies, and banks, I guess I never noticed that drug advertising makes up 50% of TV advertising.
Not me. There’s not a woman in the world I would want to trade my wife for.
I think that one thing people overlook about Trump is his use of the bully pulpit. His magic twitter thumbs says stupid stuff and things seem to happen. It is not necessary that there is government force involved as much as he is shining light in place that seem to do some good.
It is such a thankless job, especially when you are part of the opposition party.
I am somewhere between Jennifer Rubin and Jonah Goldberg in my antipathy towards Trump. However, it is sweet to read about him hanging out with his wife for a three hour dinner. Thank you for the post.
He could have made that perfectly reasonable point without calling Trump a Nazi. I don’t buy this argument that comparing Trump to Nazis is not calling Trump a Nazi. It is.
It isn’t. I do that sort of thing all the time, and I fight back against the Godwinism that limits my attempt to make reductio ad absurdum points.
@thereticulator, he didn’t call Trump a Nazi. I agree. He did, however, equate, try to show a relationship between, Trump as an evil man to another type of evil person, a Nazi. To say that @valiuth was not trying to show that would be naive, I think.
When you say someone is like a Nazi, you’re saying they’re, like, a Nazi.
He could have said the Obamas have a loving relationship and that didn’t translate to Barack being a good president.
He would have made the same point without calling Trump a Nazi (and Melania a prostitute, which was what was redacted).
He said Nazis had dinner with their wives, too. That shows a relationship? Well, it shows that they’re all humans, which is a good thing to keep in mind.
I found much of Valiuth’s reaction to be obnoxious, but on this he made a worthwhile point that contributes to the discussion.
I agree. His point was that having dinner with one’s wife is a very low bar, not that having dinner with one’s wife is exactly the sort of thing that Nazis and their ilk do. It’s something that lots of people do, and neither a mark for or against one’s character. And yes, other comments by Valiuth have been extraordinarily rude.