How did that song go? “Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile, even though it’s breaking / When there are clouds in the sky / you’ll get by.” You can read Donald Trump’s lips in this video and see clearly that’s what he’s saying to Melania. Watch, it’s right there:
Did you see it? Did you see when he tells her, “If you smile through your fear and sorrow / Smile, and maybe tomorrow / You’ll see the sun come shining through / for you?” Remarkable.
After Trump’s strange and violent visit to the St. John’s Episcopal Church in D.C. on Monday, he and his wife traveled to Saint John Paul II National Shrine on Tuesday for a photo op that effectively says, Hey I know about the whole thou shalt not kill thing, but there’s nothing in that book about pepper spray and flash grenades and I would know, I held one the other day.
Melania listened to him. She smiled. She gave him a third of a second of those pearly whites before settling into something between a duck face and sneer. That is our giving the bare minimum, queen, Melania Trump, I suppose.
We know by now not to read too far into the silent movements of this couple. We can’t know what’s in their hearts. But, since it’s a photo op, the point is the photo. We can observe that their body language when they’re around each other and guesstimate the prognosis which usually is boy, does this not look good. We can only guess from these interactions that they are one of those couples keeping it together for the children.
All we can do is see the optics, that’s okay because the optics are also pretty heinous. The photo op catches them exactly as they are, as their actions have conclusively shown them to be: grunty oafs using religious iconography to advance an agenda devoid of any humanity. It’s perfect:
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