Who's Paying Melania To Show Up For Her Husband's Campaign?
Every day she's hustling.
Well, well, well, if it isn’t some intriguing news about Melania Melanija Knavs Knauss Trump, the former first lady and shadowy chatelaine of The Trump Palm Beach Nuclear-Secret Emporium and Plastic Surgery Museum!
You’ll recall back in April she swept open the door of her million-dollar closet to give a five-minute speech at a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, which was one of only six in-person appearances she’s made this entire year.
(If you are keeping track at home, she got ogled by Viktor Orbán in March, attended a private Palm Beach fundraiser in April, went to Barron’s high school graduation in May, made a second Log Cabin Republican appearance in New York in July, and appeared briefly at the RNC in August, where she did not speak.)
MELANIE SAW HER SHADOW.
Now it turns out she didn’t put on her Michael Kors pantsuit for that Log Cabin event back in April and walk down the stairs of her own house for free. Are you shocked? Trump’s August financial disclosure showed that she was paid $237,500. Sweet grift! And now the head of the group, Charles Moran, says it wasn’t his group that paid her, actually.
First of all, can you imagine the Republican screaming if Doug Emhoff or Gwen Walz refused to appear on behalf of their spouse’s campaign unless they were paid? It would be WHERE’S DOUG and WHERE’S GWEN on the Twitters every single day. Imagine if you so rarely saw the candidate’s spouse at all, not even just driving around. KAMALA HAS TO PAY DOUG TO PRETEND TO LOVE HER! IS DOUG SICK? HAS KAMALA CHAINED DOUG UP IN THE BASEMENT!? Throw in that Doug was getting mysterious payments from an unknown source? It would be all you’d hear all day, every day.
Or imagine if Gwen Walz was selling $245 necklaces that look like a bouquet of scrotums with some janky typing on them, a $600 gold-plated coin necklace, or a $90 brass fockin Chreesmas ornament. “Trashy” would be the nicest thing she would get called. I mean, just look at this hideous stuff!
So anyway, what’s the deal with these payments? Possibility one, the head of the Log Cabin Republicans is lying. Could we be not getting complete and total honesty from the head of the group that’s trying to convince LGBTQ+ people that a Trump administration would be super great for their rights, at the very same time the right-wing nutbags on the Supreme Court are fantasizing about invalidating their marriages, and Martha “Vergogna” Alito is angrily flapping flags at her gay neighbors across the lagoon of her beach house? Charles Moran doesn’t seem like he’d have a motivation to lie, but also it doesn’t seem like he’d have a motivation to be a Republican at all. Ergo, we do not know the rules, properties or dimensions of his particular fictional universe.
DO YOU REMEMBER?
The other possibility is Trump filed a financial disclosure that is inaccurate. Which would be on-brand. But then the question remains, who did actually pay her, and why would they hide it? She’s been paid by PACs plenty of times to appear in the past, and one more time would not be a big deal. Other than how embarrassing it is that she refuses to help her husband’s campaign for free.
It’s a mystery! Just like the cat-eyed lady herself, living in a big pink house, or a Fifth Avenue aerie with shifting dimensions, who pays a stylist $370,000 to fashion her for whatever the heck it is she does in there.
As a jeweler, I *had* to, of course, check out the stuff on sale. It's vermeil, which is supposed to be a thicker plating of gold over silver than standard gold plate which is typically over a cheaper base metal, but forgive me if I don't trust the advertising on that. In any event, you can find, for example, a vermeil charm in that size for $20-$40, and one that you would probably be able to trust that it was actual vermeil.
My favorite Log Cabin Republican story is someone I know/knew through my client and his partner. Rich, gay, conservative bigot. He made this partner literally renounce US citizenship and move with him to the freaking Isle of Man for the tax haven; partner wrangled a marriage and sole-heir-in-the-will out of him. Guy dies, partner is remarried and re-USian'd, rolling in the dead guy's money, and happily working for Kamala out of his NYC highrise mansion.