The truly jarring part about Melania Trump’s disappearing act

| 9:10 am EDT June 4, 2018
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Donald Trump has often created superficial scandals to try to distract from his more harmful scandals. That creates the temptation to assume that everything that happens is some distraction gambit on his part. But most of his distractions are blunt force stupidity, not intricate plots, because he’s not that complex of a thinker. Take, for instance, Melania Trump’s disappearing act.

Even if Donald Trump had wanted to do something as devious as hiding his own wife for three weeks against her will in order to create a distraction, that would have required a huge number of moving parts to all work flawlessly, without anyone leaking anything – and that kind of thing never works for him. Melania’s disappearance is the real thing, and whatever her reason has been for vanishing, Donald is not in control of the narrative in any way. In fact it’s been tangibly hurting him.

For the past two weeks, Donald Trump and his legal team have been heavily focused on framing his obstruction of justice as having been legal, or having been the fault of someone else, or some other nonsensical explanation. It’s not a good strategy. It’s the kind of thing you end up trying once you’ve burned through all your better ideas. Nonetheless, Trump has clearly wanted his side of the obstruction story to get out there. The trouble: it’s been getting drowned out as the media has been belatedly coming around to focusing on Melania’s disappearance.

The shame here is that, even though Melania Trump’s disappearance was a major scandal the minute the White House announced that she was going to enter the hospital for several days for what should have been an outpatient procedure, most of the mainstream media ignored her suspicious disappearance for the first couple weeks. Most of the media didn’t want to touch it, perhaps for fear of offending its sources inside Melania’s office, and losing access. The media didn’t want to touch this one until the public began demanding that it do so. Here’s the jarring part.

Donald Trump’s decision to try to dishonestly cover up his wife’s ongoing disappearance is a major scandal for him. Now that the mainstream media is finally covering it properly, the White House has announced that Melania Trump will resurface today. She’s supposedly attending a Gold Star ceremony at the White House, which will conveniently be closed to the press. Shortly afterward, the White House will release a retouched photo of Melania in the White House, and it’ll insist that there never was any scandal. The jarring part is that most of the mainstream media will oblige by dropping the Melania disappearance story entirely. In that sense, Donald Trump is playing the media.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.