Does Melania Trump garden? Do you care if she does? What about how she dresses when she gardens or pretends to? Slate contributing writer Heather Schwedel sure seems to, and she went full “Mean Girl” on FLOTUS.
Last September Melania Trump gardened at the White House when a seemingly harmless picture surfaced of the First Lady in tennis shoes leaning down next to some plants during a White House event with local children. Schwedel decided to bring one photo from the event up again, to bash Melania’s seeming lack of gardening skills. Solely based on one picture from a year ago. (Ignoring the video of her helping children garden.)
Schweidel claimed that “Melania’s gardening pose suggests something between a head cheerleader half-assing her way through choreography she doesn’t feel like performing full-out and a spooked house pet who has never been in a garden before and is unsure how to comport herself in these environs.”
Why this criticism? All because she “doesn’t bother to put up her hair or exchange her designer sunglasses for a more practical wide-brimmed hat” and “her plaid top, complete with four buttons on the cuff, is from Balmain and retails for $1,380.”
On the photo itself Schwedel commented that “she holds a pair of pruning shears uneasily, as if ready not to trim an overgrowth but to snip off the ponytail of an invisible rival or a Barbie doll she is jealous of” while her “other hand poses beatifically over an empty basket, providing gestural encouragement to the basket without actually deigning to make physical contact with it.”
Schwedel then got to her real point. She showed a photo of Michelle Obama gardening while also wearing a plaid shirt saying that “once again, Michelle has been plagiarized, and once again, it’s been done very badly.” She misses her hero.
