I see your stoic, frozen face, as immutable as granite, your eyes blank as if paralysed by the horrors of some long forgotten war. I see you drift along, your hands trailing, your carefully practiced walk making you seem a fey spirit from a fevered nightmare. There’s a distant childishness to you on the rare occasion we hear you talk, as if you’re not quite all there, the ghost of a drowned girl mumbling terrifying platitudes through a Speak and Spell.
What a weird line you’ve tried to walk over the last year. For a while we were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. It was fun to watch your obvious revulsion every time Trump touched you, your face screwing up like a pickled haemorrhoid with all the instant disgust of a barefoot woman treading in cold vomit. Then you tried to pass yourself off as profound and well-intended, but it turns out Michelle Obama’s words only feel earnest the first time around. You’ve led a campaign against online harassment with all the self-awareness of a turkey married to Christmas. Then you disappeared for weeks, presumably because Trump had to wait for you to reboot after a software update. Now you’re back, expressing your concerns, flying out to visit the traumatised children of migrants in the sort of jacket that only the worst kind of vacuous prick would wear to V Festival.
Except you’re not just putting glitter on your wellies, posing for selfies and wittering on about your sales job during Belle and Sebastian, are you? You’re not an idiot or the naive artifice you present to the world. You’re a willing participant in the wholesale annihilation of the ever-dwindling American sense of decency, the Quisling wife to an utterly shameless demagogue seeking to desecrate the constitution he swore to uphold.
He’s now calling for deportations without any sort of judicial process, play number one from Despotism For Dummies, yet nobody seems to even give a shit. At the same time innocent children are still separated from their parents, scattered to the winds with no system in place to track, support or reunite them with their families. Trump has single-handedly castrated the entire Republican Party, reducing it to a quivering heap of spineless cowards who either fawn at his altar or mutter and shake their heads before obeying him anyway. He’s been everything his critics feared and worse, a toxic malignant with a booming economy and an as-yet meaningless handshake with a dictator to justify his every whim. The November midterms are now on course to be America’s moral reckoning, and the most terrifying thing about all of it? The sugar-coated turd pills he’s peddling are actually selling, and who cares if human rights go out the window while everyone is tripping balls.
I see you, Melania Trump, your eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses, the flames reflected in their lenses. I feel the wind whipping your hair and I hear the screams in the distance, gunfire rattling through the streets. If all those children had grown up to join MS-13 and had become the cause of all this violence your husband may have had a point, but they didn’t, did they? This is something else entirely – something huge and vengeful, the murdered ghost of an idea breathing life into a hundred and fifty feet of copper and iron.
I see the shadow fall over you as your secret service agents scatter, their loyalty to you worth nothing in the face of death. I see you remove your sunglasses, your green coat billowing around you. You’ve faced Trump naked. After that, you can face anything. You really don’t care, do you?
I see the Statue of Liberty loom above you, the creak of moving metal like the mourning cry of a bereaved whale. I see her turn and lift her skirt, straddling you, marking her target.
It’s a fitting end for you, Melania Trump. You and your husband have spent far too long shitting on her from a great height, and it’s only fair that she return the favour.
I see you, Melania Trump. I fucking see you.
