Donald Trump has a whole new Melania Trump problem

| 7:07 pm EDT August 19, 2018
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Some of Donald Trump’s scandals never do go away. You can’t go a day or two without his Trump-Russia criminal scandal forcing its way front and center, while his racist scandals never spend very long out of the spotlight. But like a reverse-wildcard that causes a weak hand to become even weaker, Melania Trump pops back into the frame at random, and it always ends up being problematic for Donald Trump. It’s happened yet again.

Way down in the thirtieth paragraph of an otherwise unremarkable quasi-puff piece about Melania Trump from the New York Times, we get into some real news. It turns out Donald Trump saw Melania’s “Be Best” campaign exactly like the rest of us did: something that would put the spotlight on him for being a sociopathic cyberbully. Here’s the well-buried paragraph in question:

“The president suggested that Mrs. Trump choose a different topic to avoid questions about how the wife of a notorious Twitter bully could lead a campaign to spotlight anti-bullying and other child wellness efforts, and he warned her that she was opening herself to such jeers, people familiar with the conversations said. She rejected his advice, and publicly said she was willing to face the criticism.”

This tells us something that we’ve all long suspected, which is that Melania Trump launched her anti-bullying campaign just to stick it Donald Trump, and he knew it, and she knew that he knew it. The question at hand is who fed this tidbit to the NY Times. If it came from Melania’s camp, it means she’s now trying to make herself look brave or independent at his expense, which means that she’s still trying to find a way to take him down from within. If this tidbit came from Donald Trump’s camp, it’s a whole other kind of problem.