By Dan Terry
Melania Trump broadcast a message with her choice of wearing that jacket with the words “I really don’t care. Do you?” blazoned across her back knowing it would be photographed and seen by the American people while on the way to see for herself the conditions of children ripped from their parents at the border between Mexico and the US. Despite what her spokewoman, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN about it, that it is “just a jacket” and “There was no secret message” the reality is that it was the First Lady’s jacket therefor not “just a jacket” and the message was purposeful in not being secret but clearly intended to send a message. The question that few have figured out and the answer that is shrouded in secrecy is to whom is that message aimed.
What goes on behind the marital privacy walls within the White House is beyond the reach of reporters and even WH insiders. But what has become quite clear, as often pointed out by reporter Kate Bennett who covers Melania Trump, evidenced by the First Lady’s public actions and non-verbal communications is that her relationship with her husband is rife with conflict and disagreement. How deep or bitter that conflict goes is and may remain shrouded in secrecy, but Mrs. Trump, in spite of rarely speaking publicly and never about the relationship dynamic of her marriage, visually can be quite outspoken in expressing her displeasure and distancing herself from her husband’s personality and policies.
For an understanding of the message and it’s intended target, it helps to understand the psychology of narcissists. To decode the message, requires we accept the assertions of almost all of the 27 mental health professionals and psychiatrists’ assessment that Donald Trump shows all the classic symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
One of the behaviors anyone who’s ever lived with a person with the disorder knows too well is that due to their inflated sense of self and superiority, in any argument the narcissist must always have the last word. H.G.Tudor, author of several books on Narcissism, states the narcissist’s negotiating/arguing position this way, “This requirement to be the one who has The Last Word permeates everything that we do.”
Now we can surmise and understand the First Lady’s jacket statement. What she is displaying, I suspect and suggest, as she is not free ‘enough’ to say it outright out of what surely must be a fearful coexistence with a husband whose position is as close to omnipotent as any person in history, is a direct quote of the President as the “last word” in a domestic dispute about her decision to go to the detention center to see the displaced children, that took place in a private conversation between the married couple. I suggest the argument ended with that quote and the First Lady ended the argument by giving him the belief that he’d gotten in the “last word”.
The wearing of the jacket was a shot over the bow of the President’s ship of state, that he may have thought he won the battle, but the war is not over. And she is learning that she has power as a the First Lady to broadcast to a mass audience any message she wishes despite the will and power of the President himself.
What form of punishments or suffering she will face for her courageous act, I surmise, designed to enrage Trump on a personal level only she and one other knows. But what that jacket, among other public acts of distancing she exhibits, proclaims clearly to those who study and understand dysfunctional relationship dynamics, that a very public secret war is waging in the private chambers of the White House. And she will not be bullied into silence and will get in the last word. In spite.
