Even by the low standards of Donald Trump‘s White House, having Melania Trump “write” a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin was weird. Reportedly hand-delivered to Putin before his meeting with Trump in Alaska over the weekend, the letter manages to be both frustratingly vague and dripping in saccharine, and is uncanny enough that it could have very well been written by a generative AI program and not a person. This White House is notorious for using AI to generate propagandistic documents, no doubt aware that the only people who bother to read them are a handful of journalists they can summarily dismiss as “fake news.”
In the letter, the apparent chatbot pretending to be the first lady writes, “Every child shares the same quiet dreams in their heart, whether born randomly into a nation’s rustic countryside or a magnificent city-center.” It gets worse from there, as Melania Trump pleads with the Russian dictator to care about “an innocence which stands above geography, government, and ideology,” all while carefully avoiding mentioning the real world children who have been killed, injured or kidnapped due to Russian’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. It’s just, you know, children. They’re innocent. Have mercy. Big doe eyes and perhaps a little cleavage to sell this heartfelt — or shall we say silicon chip-felt — message about kids who “are forced to carry a quiet laughter.”
Instead, it appears this letter was whipped up to appeal to a much different audience: Trump’s MAGA base, especially those needing reassurance that he cares about “the children” after weeks of painful reminders he had a decade-plus close friendship with a man who was reportedly the world’s most infamous pedophile.
What does it mean? Well, almost certainly nothing to Putin, who likely grasped immediately he is not the intended audience for this missive. After all, it was generated in English, not Russian. Even the imbeciles at the White House know that if you are trying to communicate with the president of Russia, you ask ChatGPT to write your sub-Hallmark prose in Russian. Instead, it appears this letter was whipped up to appeal to a much different audience: Trump’s MAGA base, especially those needing reassurance that he cares about “the children” after weeks of painful reminders he had a decade-plus close friendship with a man who was reportedly the world’s most infamous pedophile.
A great deal of effort was put into making sure MAGA audiences heard about this treacly letter. It was “leaked” to Fox News and posted by Trump on Truth Social. It was hyped by the White House X account as evidence Melania Trump “loves children,” and was apparently not seen to be in conflict with the steady drumbeat of sadistic memes celebrating how the president’s deportation efforts are tearing families apart. The letter worked as intended, causing a gushing response from Trump supporters, as they congratulated themselves for being good Christians and swooned at how “compassionate” the first lady is.
It’s unsettling to people outside the MAGA cult, because the real world evidence negates this phony image of Melania Trump as a loving figure. For one thing, she was right by Donald Trump’s side as he partied for years with Epstein, all while the financier was allegedly trafficking and abusing underage girls. She was the one who wore the infamous “I don’t really care, do U?” jacket during Trump’s first term in response to outrage about the administration kidnapping children from immigrant parents. Her “charity” efforts for children have been anemic, or perhaps even fake altogether, mostly composed of a few press releases about how bullying is bad — and backed up with no effort or resources directed towards helping anyone.
None of that matters to Trump voters, though, because all this isn’t actually about protecting children or promoting world peace. It’s about gender. MAGA has a bottomless appetite for stories reinforcing their comically ham-fisted ideas of the roles of men and women. It doesn’t matter if those narratives are obviously fake. The evidence suggests the real-life Melania Trump is a small-minded person who hates Christmas, despises flowers and has no interest in anyone’s family but her own. But she is female, so Trump’s followers are eager to project their tradwife fantasies onto her, remaking her into Mother Teresa with a push-up bra and a Botox administrator on standby. Truly, it was nauseating seeing the responses to “her” letter on Truth Social, which veered between portraying her as the sexiest woman alive and gushing about her imaginary “kindness, love and compassion.”
As I wrote on Monday, Donald Trump has glommed onto this “Daddy” nickname, which was first given to him by Tucker Carlson, because it so perfectly captures the fascist power fantasy that drives MAGA. “Daddy” is an aspirational figure to them. But he’s not a loving figure. On the contrary, the MAGA “Daddy” is unapologetically abusive, devoid of empathy and always eager to find someone smaller and weaker to dominate, often through sexual violence. But even most right-wingers don’t want to think of themselves as total monsters. So they also cling to the image of the “Mommy,” the woman who is there to provide all the comfort and care that Daddy is too manly to offer.
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Mommy will wipe up your tears and bandage your cuts after Daddy beats you. But she will never, ever turn her back on Daddy, because another of Mommy’s feminine virtues is her submission and loyalty. She is there to be the spinmeister for Daddy, reassuring everyone there’s a good heart underneath all that violence. It’s not true — but it doesn’t have to be. Daddy doesn’t need to have a heart, because Mommy’s endless reservoir of love and compassion is more than enough to compensate for what Daddy lacks.
If this sounds like an exaggerated version of this worldview, look no further than “The War on Warriors,” the book written by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that launched his bid to become a MAGA leader. In it, he defends his view that women have no place fighting in the military because “Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”
Hegseth’s reductive view of gender is so over-the-top it’s hard to believe an adult human being wrote it — and it’s not just the literal fact that not all women are mothers. The gender essentialism is beyond parody, where all women exist only inside the narrow parameters of a toddler’s view of Mommy. This attitude was echoed by Hegseth when he recently posted a CNN report on the leader of his church. “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” the pastor told the reporter, noting that women have no role outside of nurturing children and tending to husbands. In other words: Mommy isn’t a person, which would suggest she might have ambitions and desires outside of suckling babies.
Melania Trump’s “Dear President Putin” letter wasn’t about persuading the Russian president to make peace. It was about using these retrograde gender stereotypes to get the MAGA base invested in her husband’s flailing attempts to make a “deal” with Putin. By casting Melania Trump in the role of the submissive angel of the administration who is begging Putin for mercy, the White House can look like they’re doing something — and framing it in terms their many sexism-addled supporters can understand. The letter also perversely works as pro-Putin propaganda. It reads very much like every excuse conservative women make for abusive men: He means well, it’s not his fault, he just needs the kindness of a woman’s touch to convince him to be gentle.
Helpfully for both Donald Trump and Putin, this could also help shield them from blame, diverting it to Melania Trump, if a peace deal were to fall apart. They are men, after all, and MAGA knows men can’t be expected to generate compassion and mercy on their own. That’s the job of women — to persuade them through hair-stroking, batting eyes and flattery. It’s a narrative that men in patriarchal societies have leaned on for eons to justify holding all the power while accepting none of its responsibility.
Not that anyone should feel sorry for Melania Trump. The first lady appears only too happy to fake compassion — with the likely help of AI — in exchange for living the coddled life of a trophy wife. She probably likes all these MAGA people flattering her by talking about the grace and decency she likely does not, in fact, possess. Plus, she gets to have it all without having to do even the basic work of writing her own bizarre letters. Playing Submissive Mommy to please the MAGA audiences is work best left to ChatGPT.
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