The first lady’s fashion sense is often the subject of media speculation, but sometimes, you don’t have to look very hard to understand the meaning of Melania Trump’s outfits. The latest wardrobe decision from the former model was to wear a jacket with the words “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?” painted on the back as she set off to make a surprise visit to two detention facilities holding undocumented immigrant children on the Texas border. Her spokesperson confirmed that Trump wore the $39 Zara jacket while boarding the plane to Texas, telling CNN’s Jim Acosta, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn’t going to choose to focus on her wardrobe.”
The spokeswoman for the First Lady makes a good point—there is no hidden meaning on her jacket, it’s literally printed on the back.
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Even by the utterly fucked standards of 2018, this was a pretty on-the-nose moment, and people reacted predictably. “This Melania jacket thing cannot be real. Can’t. I’m choosing to not believe it,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote on Twitter. CNN reporter Kate Bennett called the coat “an unfortunate sartorial decision,” while the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein drew comparisons to the right-wing outrage over Obama wearing a tan suit in 2014, tweeting, “It’s become clear that a lot of people are just angry about Melania’s jacket because they are upset over how people reacted to Obama’s tan suit.” Activist Jordan Uhl opined that the warm weather in Washington DC and Texas on Thursday did not warrant a jacket and that “this was deliberate.”
Others focused on the affordable price of the jacket. “It’s a $39 jacket, a price point Melania wouldn’t be caught dead in. This was no accident,” a columnist for Canada’s National Observer remarked. Regardless of whether the jacket symbolizes what we all already know—that the Trump administration doesn’t “really care” about immigrant children and Melania doesn’t take her position as First Lady particularly seriously—the inevitable question that arises is: Did not a single FLOTUS staffer warn her of the backlash such an ostentatious jacket would garner? Or perhaps, as the jacket so clearly states, no one really cared.
Update 6:00pm: Naturally, Donald Trump took to Twitter to clarify the statement his wife intended to make with her jacket:
Predictably, the president’s assertion that “Melania’s jacket refers to the Fake News Media” contradicts her spokeswoman’s claim that “there was no hidden message.”
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