Terry Prone: Stop seeking sense from Donald Trump and his semi-detached first lady Melania

Melania Trump baffled everyone with a speech announcing that she was not a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. What the hell was that about? What did she mean about false claims? What were they?

US first lady Melania Trump made a weird White House speech announcing that she was not a victim of Jeffrey Epstein.  Picture: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Enough is enough. That’s what Melania Trump’s senior PR guy said when asked to explain why she appeared out of the blue on Thursday, speaking from the Grand Foyer of the White House in a five-minute speech announcing that she was not a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. 

“The lies must stop,” the spokesman added, which was forthright and decisive of him. A bit like the first lady herself when, in that speech, she opined that claims linking her to Jeffrey Epstein “need to end today”. 

Just that. No questions taken from pesky media. 

This was high-profile specific deadline delivery. The claims didn’t need to end the following day. Nope. It had to be Thursday. 

Melania’s husband has a glittering track record when it comes to confusing listeners, but Thursday’s outing put her right up there beside him. It’s fair to say that the general reaction to her speech was a baffled double-take: What the hell was that about? What did she mean about false claims? What were they?

No guilty party came rushing out on mainstream or social media to confess to having promulgated a false claim, apologise, or announce their intention to stop such promulgation.

Instead, everybody wanted to know what the woman was on about.

Well, not everybody. Anybody with sense and a life ignored her, which is the only sensible thing to do with Melania Trump.

During her five minutes, she also denied online rumours that Epstein introduced her to Trump. 

So... Where was the defamation? 

The funny bit was her labelling statements that he had introduced the two of them as “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation”. How, exactly? Where’s the crime — or even misdemeanor — in being introduced to Trump? Where’s the problem in being introduced to The Donald by a guy it took a few decades to reveal in his full criminal horror?

Or maybe she meant that anybody introducing her to Trump was setting her on the road to a ruined reputation? 

It could certainly be argued that her reputation might be in better shape if she had never been introduced to Trump. On the other hand, she would be millions of dollars poorer and not known to anyone. 

You win some, you lose some. 

Melania and Ghislaine Maxwell 

Not only did the semi-detached first lady instruct the world on what had to happen that Thursday, she also denied having known Epstein’s girlfriend and procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell. 

This, despite a photograph of Melania and Ghislaine with their partners in a social setting. This, also, despite the revelation in the Epstein files of exchanges of emails between the two women, with her signing off with “Love, Melania”. 

Didn’t know her, huh?

Maybe the PR man quoted earlier should have alerted his client to the inconsistency demonstrated in that claim. When we refer to Melania as a semi-detached first lady, let us illustrate the point. 

This woman doesn’t live in the White House. She seems to have visiting rights, but prefers to hunker down elsewhere, specifically in New York, which might explain the confusion between herself and the hubby about her speech on Thursday.

His lot said they didn’t know about it. Her lot said his lot definitely did know about it. Or maybe, came the partial correction, they knew she was going to say something, but not what it was going to be about. Which does point to the semi-detached nature of her relationship with the US president and his people.

The episode does point up a fascinating human reality, which is that, when something inexplicable happens, human beings are cognitively affronted by it. 

Either they find a way to convince themselves that it isn’t happening or never happened or, while accepting that it did happen, they try to re-frame it so that it fits in their understanding of the world.

The gorilla basketball test

The best example of the first is a marvellous psychological experiment that you can view here on YouTube where viewers are absorbed in students playing basketball. 

Viewers are so absorbed that, when a lad wearing a gorilla suit wanders among the players, most of them never notice because of inattentional blindness. That’s where you fail to notice something happening right in front of you because your focus is on something else.

'Trump always chickens out' 

The second cognitive challenge forces people to re-frame an event in terms they understand. It’s a great mental exercise and Donald Trump is a constant catalyst for the process.

Think of “Trump always chickens out” (Taco), where someone baffled by Trump’s constant mind-changes came up with the statement and made an acronym out of it.

There’s coping skills for you.

Melania, last week, presented a case study in pointless presentation, just months after starring in a film about herself where box office returns were pathetic.

 

However, the movie did prove one thing about her: She wears clothes very well. Let us not underestimate that as a skill or as a benefit to humanity.

Some of us still turn queasy two decades after seeing her, starkers and eight months pregnant, standing in the open back end of Trump’s airplane while her clothed husband sat in his big car not looking at her.

That was just one of the outings to which she commits herself that are without any normal objective.

The gift of attention

The latest was the five-minute speech, to which the proper reaction should have been a shrug, a couple of raised eyebrows, and an end to the gift of attention.

Instead, people made the mistake of applying logic to the issue.

They asked, rhetorically, why the semi-detached first lady would grab world media by the short and curlies to reintroduce a connection with a dead paedophile when the president has been doing his level best to obscure that connection.

Threat to end a civilisation 

People also wondered why, in the middle of a war — with the US president threatening to end, not a state, but a civilisation — the administration didn’t say to Melania: “You know, first lady, maybe you’d hold off this particular serving of weird for a while. The timing, right now, might not be optimal.”

The thing about applying logic to the Trumps is that it doesn’t work.

Logic isn’t valid currency around them, but the human instinct to understand crazy stuff means that everybody keeps trying it out.

Media muddle 

Particularly media positive towards the Trumps such as Fox News, where a reporter said that maybe “there was something that she [Melania] is reacting to that might already be in the news that has upset her, or if there’s a story yet to come out, that’s about to drop that she wanted to get ahead of.”

This scenario has its appeal if, like many commentators, you believe the administration exemplifies the Steve Bannon coinage of “flooding the zone”, meaning constantly producing one scandal to distract from another.

It’s been a tempting interpretation and made its adherents sound wise and knowing. Up to recently. It may have run its course.

Maybe it’s time to accept that “flooding the zone” is another example of humans applying logic to a random craziness that’s not amenable to it.