How we all got snookered by the Melania Trump hospital scandal

| 9:04 pm EDT May 21, 2018
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So that’s it, eh? We’ve all stopped caring why the First Lady of the United States mysteriously disappeared into the hospital for a week for a “kidney procedure” that shouldn’t have taken more than a day or two. Nevermind that we were clearly lied to about why she was hospitalized, and that something major about her is being kept secret. We’ve all given up on even trying to solve that riddle, because hey, Donald Trump spelled her name wrong. No, really.

As last week went on and it became more clear that something wasn’t right about Melania Trump’s hospitalization, the major media outlets finally began asking the tough questions. When the White House refused to even acknowledge whether Melania was still in the hospital, the media began running headlines asking what was really going on with her health. Then Donald Trump posted a tweet welcoming “Melanie” home from the hospital, and suddenly that was the story.

Let’s all laugh at the senile dotard who can’t even get his own wife’s name right, we figured. I’ll admit, I fell for it too. And why not? Of all the ways to screw up, Trump couldn’t have picked a worse way than screwing up his wife’s name just as she was returning home from some mysterious hush-hush hospitalization. But the “Melanie” punchline caused everyone to stop asking the important questions about whether the White House covered up some kind of serious medical crisis. Now the moment has passed, and the whole mystery has been pushed off the page by the next round of Trump scandals.

Donald Trump isn’t one tenth as smart as he thinks he is. When he tries to make his scandals go away, he usually ends up making them worse. But I’m almost tempted to wonder if he tweeted “Melanie” on purpose, to shift the storyline away from Melania’s health scandal. If she was hoping to make the story go away, then Donald did her a favor by getting her name wrong. Could he have done it on purpose? Either that, or he really is that senile, and we all snookered ourselves into forgetting about the Melania hospital scandal.