Fast & Furious Trump and the Weird Melania Moment
The defeat of Hungary’s moldy strongman Viktor Orbán is a thrilling rejuvenation of liberal democracy, after sixteen years of his systemic corruption, dismantling of parliamentary checks and balances, and brutal suppression of the press. Trump, who likes to say, “I am MAGA,” should take note. History tells us that there almost always comes a moment when a restive population decides the emperor has no clothes.
Trump, who has never met an authoritarian he doesn’t like, was a longtime fanboy of the appalling Orbán, a woke-bashing Putin groupie as helpfully hostile to Ukraine as he was an enemy of immigrants and minorities and a crowd favorite at CPAC in the U.S. two years in a row. (Kati Marton, the Hungarian-American author and historian exulted in an email, “That a tinpot wannabe dictator and Hungary have taught the U.S. a lesson in democracy is rich in irony.”) VP Vance’s flyby in Budapest last week to support Orbán’s cratering candidacy made zero impact. Péter Magyar, charismatic, 45-year-old, and pro-European, handily beat the iron-fisted, favor-scarfing incumbent crook, and declared, “Our homeland made up its mind. It wants to live again.”
Live. That sounds nice. The thankfully whiffed armageddon for Iran following Trump’s threat to obliterate its “whole civilization, never to be brought back again” by 8pm last Tuesday left a hangover of global agita. At this point, Trump’s psychosis is our biggest national export. The tariff debacle. The Greenland flap. The Strait of Hormuz horror. And let’s not forget the Venezuela snatch, the Minneapolis beat-down, Bryon Noem’s balloon breasts. It’s all too much. Trump is a shredder of brain cells, a one-man opportunity cost. He’s trapped us 24/7 in a nerve-juddering Fast & Furious sequel, with a star who is clapped-out, overpaid, and impossible to work with. This morning, he trashed the Pope — more flailing, more noise – and tightened everyone’s sphincter with a new blockade of the strait.
War Games
Meanwhile, Vance, fresh from fanning Orbán’s defeat, went 0-2 on the international stage last week, his pumpkin face deflated when he emerged from more than 20 hours of fruitless talks with Iranian leaders at Islamabad’s Serena Hotel. Except to team Trump, it was an unsurprising outcome, given that the Obama nuclear negotiations took nearly two years of circuitous feint and double feint dialogue with Tehran before the 2015 JCPOA deal was signed. When will Trump understand that the ancient empire of Iran doesn’t do deadlines? “We are open to dialogue and negotiation,” Medhi Tabatabei, an Iranian presidential deputy, posted on Sunday. “But we do not submit to force.”
War Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps insisting the Iranian command and control has been “systematically eliminated.” But, as devastating as that opening blow was, decades of menace and survival tactics have left the third layer of hardline Iranian leaders psychologically prepared. From bunker hideouts with compromised communication, they have somehow carefully calibrated how far to climb the escalation ladder against Israel and the other Gulf states, when to call the ever battle-ready pirates, the Yemeni Houthis, off the bench, and how to turn the Strait of Hormuz into an instrument of blackmail. “All of this required a degree of... cold-minded, very sober decision-making,” the Iran expert Ali Vaez told The News Agents podcast. “It was very hard to do under these circumstances, and yet they managed to do it.” Yep, the resurgent Revolutionary Guards seem to be operating just fine under the new leadership of a nepo mullah with a likely amputated leg and some of his face blown off. Which is more than you can say of Trump’s war cabinet, where a president driven by limbic instincts is advised by a bellicose war secretary and a conclave of castrated mutes.
Talking Sphinx
Clearly, the only person who doesn’t ask Trump for permission to speak is Melania. She doesn’t give a sheet. Just when her husband got his wish and the Epstein files had dropped out of the news, FLOTUS went rogue with a startling press conference on Thursday, defending her “good name” from “mean-spirited lies” about any disreputable association with Jeffrey Epstein. Huh?
There’s always been something strangely off-kilter about Melania’s rare public interventions. Her moments of pugilism are puzzlingly detached from any sense of their possible impact. Remember the 2018 furor over the Zara jacket emblazoned on the back with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” that she wore to visit a migrant children’s shelter in Texas? It was never explained if this was a fuck-you message to her husband, to the press, to Democrats or (surely not) the children she was visiting. Melania is a master of what I think of as the Garbo misfire.
In her Amazon autohagiography Melania, she speaks much about “nurturing family,” but we never see her doing so. She descends a golden staircase in four-inch stilettos. She instructs her stylist to cinch the waist of her custom jacket tighter, tighter, and to make the lapel sharp, more sharp. Her husband’s most memorable pass-through appearance is as an invisible rasp on a speakerphone, needily asking if she had watched his 2024 election victory being certified by Congress.
“Hi, Meester President, congratulations!”
“Did you watch it?”
“I did not.”
Her power over Trump is to keep the ultimate narcissist in a permanent withholding pattern. Occasionally, their son Barron looms into shot like a blank, patent-haired giraffe. She seems to live alone in a world of mirrors.
Brazilian Wax
In her press conference, Melania appears to have been getting ahead of the social media revenge tour of Brazilian former model Amanda Ungaro, who arrived in the U.S. in 2002 at age 17 with a contingent of other young models on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. Ungaro is the ex-partner of Trump’s sketchy BFF fixer Paolo Zampolli, the man who first introduced Melania to Trump in 1998 at NYC’s Kit Kat Club. The bitter Brazilian now alleges that Zampolli reported her to ICE, in order to gain custody of their teenage son, and caused her to be held for a traumatic three-and-a-half months in a Miami detention center. Her beef with Melania is that the First Lady did nothing to help in her hour of need. “I have known you for 20 years,” Ungaro claimed. “You knew I was detained in ICE. You were present in my life — every year on my son’s birthday.”
Melania is a walking shrug, but Ungaro has clearly got under her skin. Mrs. Trump is obsessed with her origin story as a Slovenian glamour princess and cover girl who floated magically into Trump’s orbit, in the same way that her reality-bending husband is consumed with perpetuating his image as the greatest dealmaker the world has ever seen. These are the treasured myths that bind the First Couple. Melania’s stiletto heels will become a weapon of war if Ungaro tries to undermine the chosen version of her life.
"Occasionally, their son Barron looms into shot like a blank, patent-haired giraffe."
Best. Line. Ever!
Great analysis, Tina! I especially loved "a president driven by limbic instincts is advised by a bellicose war secretary and a conclave of castrated mutes." The prez would be nothing without the castrated mutes.