As a part of her farewell to the East Wing, Melania Trump posted a Be Best campaign recap to Twitter. In the tweet she wrote, “As the legacy of #BeBest comes to a close at the @WhiteHouse, we must continue to give a voice to our Nation’s children & the issues that impact their lives. It’s the values & spirit of the American people that inspired Be Best & it’s those values that will carry on its mission.”:
https://twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/1350080519480946688
But the legacy is really only beginning, I think. Isn’t that how legacies work? I don’t know. Maybe it’s unfair to nitpick the tweet of an outgoing first lady whose team skedaddled out of the East Wing right before the eleventh hour.
If it’s hard not to nitpick, it’s also hard not to compare Trump with her successor, Jill Biden, as we go out with the old and in with the new. Biden announced yesterday, a little less than a week before she will officially be installed in the East Wing, that she will revive an old initiative from her time as second lady, Joining Forces. She also named a series of hires. Trump took about a year to put together the Be Best campaign, and made hires slowly, keeping a much smaller staff than most of her modern predecessors. You might also remember it took her months to even move into the White House.
The Joining Forces program, which Biden originally launched alongside then first lady Michelle Obama in 2011, focuses on education, employment, and well-being support from the private and public sectors for military families, and will relaunch with a listening tour to discern current needs. Biden has a personal connection with such a cause, considering her late son, Beau, was a member of the Delaware Army National Guard.
Melania Trump’s Be Best, meanwhile, was a childhood well-being project aimed at addressing opioid addiction and foster care and cyberbullying and military children and more. I suppose that Trump also has a personal connection to her cause of “helping children, generally.” She does have a child.
It’s unfair to compare especially because in the end, Be Best’s cyberbullying effort, though quietly abandoned at some point over her tenure, was ultimately a success. The biggest schoolyard bully of all got booted from most social media platforms before Melania was through.
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