Ooh, Here's A Trashy Idea: Melania On The Cover Of Vanity Fair!
Apparently the new editor thinks so too.
If you know anything about Donald Trump, it’s that some of his oldest, deepest wounds and insecurities stem from how he’s always been utterly rejected as outer borough trash by the people whose approval he’s craved the most. (At least outside of the approval of his mangled-looking father.) We mean of course true New York society, real intelligentsia, the people who actually drive culture.
That’s why he’s so obsessed with the Kennedy Center, why he’s desperate to leave his “artistic” mark on it, and why he’s so slobberingly thirsty to prove that he belongs at its helm. It’s why he babbles about how he was told he had musical acumen as a child. He thinks his taste in music and musical theater is classy, when it’s just about the most boring ass basic bitch shit you could imagine, the kinds of music 90-year-old white people who think Carrabba’s is fancy request when they see a young person playing piano. “Do you know anything from Phantom of the Opera?” Of course they do, because people like you request that shit incessantly.
These are not people who ever ask for Sondheim.
His taste in music and theater is lowest common denominator, his taste in interior design is downright classless and ugly and sooooo fucking new money, but oh sweet Jesus, he’s 79 years old and possibly dying of whatever is causing his gangrenous hands to rot off, and he still craves one moment of acceptance from the actual “in” crowd.
That’s why it matters that the staff of Vanity Fair reportedly went absolutely ballistic and may have prevented Trump’s trashy wife from being on their cover, though that second part is in no way certain. Can you fucking imagine?
The headline at the Daily Beast features the quote “I will walk out the motherfucking door,” and it isn’t a scene from the Trump marriage, because come on, you’re not still comforting yourself by pretending Melania is a victim in all this, are you? Pfffft.
No, the story is that the new editor of Vanity Fair, Mark Guiducci, thought it’d be really cool to put Melania Trump on the cover. You know, to appeal to a broader audience that includes MAGA people, who famously read things. Ooh, and you know how much they like culture and high fashion and shit like that! This little factoid was in a Semafor article on Sunday.
So anyway, that’s when, per the Daily Beast, the Vanity Fair staff lost its entire shit.
Like so:
On Monday, the Daily Mail spoke to a “mid-level editor” at the magazine who said that there would be immediate turnover if Melania made the cover.
“I will walk out the motherf---ing door, and half my staff will follow me,” the editor said.
“We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to stand for what’s right.”
Finally, somebody who isn’t going to normalize the despot and his asshole wife! Are the media and higher education and big law firms and big business that brings the despot golden trinkets to make him giggle paying attention?
“If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s, I’ll do it,” the editor said. “If [Guiducci] puts Melania on the cover, half of the editorial staff will walk out, I guarantee it.”
Again, can you imagine? For the publication whose most famous editor named Trump the “short-fingered vulgarian” and proceeded to keep the insult going for 25 years to fall so far that it’s eating Melania Trump’s ass on the cover in the year of our Lord 2025? (Which may be the year those short fingers literally fall off if you’ve seen any pictures of Trump’s carcass flesh lately.)
The Beast notes that “Fox & Friends” was really into the idea, with Sean Hannity’s loverrrrrrr Ainsley Earhardt saying that “I would buy the magazine” if Melania was on the cover, “I’d buy several of them if they would do this, just to prove a point.”
Again, more evidence of conservatives’ longtime familiarity with reading and the publications that encourage it.
“You should be fired,” said Brian Kilmeade, the “Fox & Friends”-er who always looks like he got smacked in the head with a “Looney Tunes” anvil right while he was squatting in the corner, trying to take a furtive toddler shit. “If you’re at Vanity Fair right now, look for a mid-level editor who looks angry, and toss them out and send them to Trader Joe’s!“
OK, Brian.
Meanwhile last night, The Wrap reported that Kat Timpf, sitting in as host for Greg Gutfeld, spent considerable time telling whatever dog-brained people watch “Gutfeld!” that compromising with Nazis is just part of being an American and being a grown-up with a job, like come on:
“Refusing to work with people with whom you disagree is ridiculous,” Timpf said. “And it is a lesson these magazine staffers need to learn because people everywhere are starting to realize it … Greg may be right when he says this is evidence of the culture shifting towards the right. But it could be a shift not away from the left or even towards the right but towards a culture that doesn’t decide the value of a person based on politics. We used to call it being American.”
Timpf’s final point was equally universal: “Having to deal with stuff at work that you don’t like isn’t unique to media. It is literally what a job is. … So if you work at Vanity Fair and think that Trump and his wife are awful, that’s fine. No one is expecting you to change your mind. But what you shouldn’t expect is for the entire trajectory of the magazine to revolve around you and your opinion. That is not compassion, that is self-obsession.”
We used to call licking Nazi dick being American, you guys, like why are you so self-obsessed?
We are sure Mark Guiducci’s big idea to put America’s garbage first lady who dresses like the Babadook on the cover will just fly off the shelves, especially among people who use print media to line the cages of whatever roadkill pets MAGA people are keeping in their hoarder houses.
Of course, everybody with an ounce of class who still subscribes to the print edition and has done so since college — including yours truly — will likely put an end to that practice at once.
Golly, what should Vanity Fair’s new hacky editor choose? Eat the Fourth Reich’s asshole or don’t do that?
Being a big boy 37-year-old magazine editor who’s never done anything like this before sure is full of choices!
Here’s another one of Guiducci’s big ideas, per Semafor:
He has had conversations with Olivia Nuzzi about a role writing for the magazine. (Nuzzi left New York Magazine following an undisclosed relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a recent presidential candidate.)
Totally nailing it, bro, don’t let anybody tell you any different.
[Daily Beast / The Wrap / Semafor]
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Why not Ghislaine Maxwell?
I'll point out to "Vanity Fair" that images of Eva Braun are now likely to be in the public domain and, therefore, free use.