For its Monday cover story, the New York Post resurfaced another round of titillating “exclusive” nude photos of Melania Trump (née Knauss), this time in bed and cozying up to a naked Scandinavian model.
The “Menage a Trump” feature is part deux of a scoop that was low-hanging fruit even for the Post: on Sunday, the tabloid ran a front-page photo of a nude Melania with stars photoshopped over her nipples like pasties.
The pictures were taken in 1995 during a photo shoot for a now-defunct French magazine, when the Republican candidate’s wife was 25 and known as “Melania K” in the modeling world.
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Trump, whom the Post has endorsed, was seemingly complicit in their re-publication: he was quoted in Sunday’s feature defending himself and his wife—but mostly himself. “This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania,” he told the paper. “In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.”
On Monday, Trump’s senior adviser Jason Miller described the photos as “a celebration of the human body as art,” adding that “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Miller is right, of course—even if he sounds utterly disingenuous.
But where is the feminist defense of Melania’s creative and sexual expression? Why haven’t Lena Dunham and her body positivity-championing cohorts chimed in on Twitter? Why didn’t Amy Schumer call out the Post for taking a cheap shot at Melania? Where’s Emily Ratajkowski’s nude #solidarity selfie?
With the exception of Patricia Arquette, who defended Melania early Monday morning on Twitter (“So @MELANIATRUMP was naked. She was a model. Now leave her alone.”), there’s been a dearth of prominent feminist voices on the repackaged nudes.
To be sure, Melania Trump chose to pose naked and isn’t a victim here. It’s not as if the nudes were publicized without her consent—at least not the first time around, when they were taken in the mid-1990s.
But the timing of the photos’ re-publication, along with the never-before-seen “exclusives” that ran in Monday’s paper, makes this a particularly tasteless stunt.
It comes amidst outrage over Donald Trump’s feud with the parents of a fallen Muslim soldier; amidst Trump’s promise to crack down on pornography; on the heels of his remarks that Russia should hack the private email server Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state (and subsequent insistence that he was “being sarcastic,” of course).
Given the circumstances, the nude Melania photos look like a convenient distraction for the Trump campaign—Gawker and The View mulled whether it was an attempt by the campaign itself to throw a wrench in a particularly negative political news cycle, using Melania as a scapegoat.
It also comes on the heels of Melania’s bungled RNC speech, a passage of which was plagiarized from a 2008 convention speech by Michelle Obama. The Trump campaign lied and filibustered for 36 hours before an “in-house” speechwriter took responsibility for the lifted words and phrases.
It was supposed to be Melania’s big moment, one of precious few times when she would emerge from backstage and say something substantive, and she was humiliated. As New York’s Rebecca Traister argued, Trump’s team failed her by not hiring a better speechwriter to work with the woman running to be America’s first lady.
The Post’s resurfaced photos seem like less of an attempt to humiliate Trump than to humiliate Mrs. Trump. It’s not the nude photos themselves that are embarrassing, but that Melania continues to prove a scapegoat for her husband’s reckless presidential campaign.
All the more reason, then, for prominent feminists to speak up about the Post’s tasteless covers. Perhaps they haven’t done so because Melania is not a feminist herself, at least not publicly. Could this be why feminists are not rushing to the defense of a woman who isn’t part of their tribe, particularly when the woman is the trophy wife of one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history?
Surely Dunham and others would be outraged if the Post had resurfaced nude photos of Ivanka Trump, who is at least well-spoken and sides with women in her speeches—and advocates for working women via her fashion-focused blog—even while promising that her grotesquely misogynistic father will Make America Great Again.
Melania Trump, by contrast, is a bimbo with fake tits and a rich husband. Or at least that’s the image we’ve been sold. Mrs. Trump has taken few opportunities to prove otherwise—and so the Lena Dunhams of the world have little interest in standing up for the Melania Trumps of the world.
