Melania Trump’s uncool fashion choice

In the normal course of things, US first lady Melania Trump is an object of public sympathy, for having to live with the kind of man her husband is.

Her visit to a child migrant detention centre, where young children forcibly separated from their ‘criminal’ parents are housed while officials search for a foster home, was meant to give her an even more sympathetic profile, even as most Americans rise up in revulsion at President Donald Trump’s policy of sending people, mostly women, who cross into the US from across the southern border with Mexico accompanied by their children, to jail while their toddlers are taken into state custody.

Illegal immigrants are deemed criminals, but not their children. Criminals are packed off to jail, while the children, many toddlers, are detained at the kind of centres that Melania Trump visited. Trouble was, she wore a jacket that bore the legend, ‘I really don’t care, Do U?’. Well might White House spinmeisters bring out proverbs — don’t judge a book by its cover — or simply urge the media not to read any hidden message in the jacket’s slogan. The damage was done.


Melania Trump had joined those condemning child separation, and Trump did change his policy, although not for the children already separated. So, her choice of the jacket was probably more silly than callous. Talk about uncool fashion choices.