Melania Trump might take Donald Trump down all by herself

| 10:02 pm EDT June 22, 2018
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During his three card monty of a presidency, Donald Trump has created so many negative controversies for himself for the express purpose of distracting us from even more negative controversies about himself, we’ve come to expect it. Every time something happens, we wonder if it’s yet another intentional distraction, and what he’s trying to distract us from this time. But when it comes to this Melania derailment, there’s no one driving the train.

Think it through: Melania Trump was supposed to go to the border and sell the idea that the Trump regime cares about the immigrant kids who are being held hostage by Donald Trump. The entire plan depended on her coming off as human. The bar was set pretty low, as all she had to do was show up and not be Donald. She was the distraction. That was, of course, until she began her journey to the border by wearing a jacket that literally said “I really don’t care.”

The jacket ended up distracting from her visit, thus sabotaging any goodwill that she and the White House were supposed to get from it. Instead of the headlines being “Melania visits immigrant kids and seeks to help them,” the headlines ended up being “Melania doesn’t care about these kids.” This was not some grand distraction scheme on Donald Trump’s part. It was simply a disaster for him. And it was either a disaster because Melania wanted it to be a disaster, or because her decision-making has become so far removed from reality that she didn’t realize her jacket was going to make it a disaster.

Either of those scenarios is particularly problematic. Either Melania Trump is so desperate to destroy her husband that she’s made the calculated decision to make herself look like a monster just to make sure he looks like a monster, or she’s just spiraling incoherently out of control. Either way, she just became his biggest liability. Whatever this is, if she keeps escalating it, she might push Donald Trump’s presidency into an untenable place all by herself.