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Despite Vogue’s tradition of putting first ladies on its cover, Melania was never invited for a photoshoot and an interview by Condé Nast’s fashion bible. By comparison, Michelle Obama landed the cover three times during her husband’s terms in office. Jill Biden graced it twice.
“If Melania were a Democrat and said the right things she’d be on every single cover of every single magazine,” one media industry veteran told me.
“They covered Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding like it was the second coming, and he was a total disaster. It’s an egregious double standard.”
The Spectator reported on the obsession with getting Melania into the glossies on its website back in 2018, when pro-Trump actor James Woods posted incessantly on Twitter about the beauty and grace of the first lady and demanded to know why she wasn’t in Vogue.
“Since no American magazine will have put her on a cover, we’ll just have to celebrate her ourselves,” wrote Woods. He attached a photo of Mrs. Trump affixing ornaments to a Christmas tree.
No one has written about the Trump style quite like John Binder, a reporter covering immigration for Breitbart News, who also serves as the website’s fashion critic (yes, Breitbart has a fashion critic). “Americans are hungry for content like this; they want to see coverage of the most elegant people in the world,” Binder told me in a phone interview. “And Melania Trump, in particular, is not only one of the most elegant people in the world, she’s also like the most fashionable first lady we’ve ever had. She has long surpassed Jackie Kennedy. There’s no question.”
So it was baffling to Binder that, throughout Trump’s first term, he was often the only reporter covering the first family. “I just could never understand that the same people that had been praising the prior eight years of cardigans and khakis were criticizing this woman who was wearing the most elegant fashion that you could imagine,” he said.
In the pages of Breitbart, Binder regularly scolded the rest of the media for ignoring Melania.
“She’s the most fashionable United States First Lady the world has ever seen,” he wrote in 2018. “The most striking. The most poised in modern history. The quietest. The most deliberate. And the establishment press refuses to give her the time of day.”
After Trump was voted out of office in 2020, he posted one of Binder’s stories on Melania’s fashion, bearing the caption: “The elitist snobs in the fashion press have kept the most elegant First Lady in American history off the covers of their magazines for 4 consecutive years.”
Now, Binder sees the tide turning.
“Would it be so great if I continued to be the only person covering Melania’s clothes so intently? Yeah, that would be amazing. But truthfully, I hope that everyone else does start covering her. And I think the pendulum is swinging back to the middle.” Despite the right’s complaints, the snub isn’t a mystery. The fashion world is overwhelmingly liberal. And Trump will never be exactly mainstream. When his supporters stormed the Capitol in 2021 and he fled to Mar-a-Lago in disgrace, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that it vindicated the refusal of institutions such as Vogue to normalize the Trumps. How would it have looked if, the month before, his wife had been treated to a Vogue cover with fawning copy to accompany it?
For that reason, among others, don’t expect the Trumps to land a Vogue cover anytime soon. I’m told the magazine has no plans to put Ivanka, Melania or Usha on the front of any of its editions, despite the brave new world where MAGA is the white-hot center of the culture.
For now, supporters of the first family will have to settle for lesser prizes. Hello! magazine, the fading British rag that now mostly collects dust on the shelves of airport convenience stores, published in early February what in any other time would be a major exclusive: a cover story and interview with First Lady Melania Trump.
The story featured glam shots of Melania posing under Trump Force One in a serious gray suit and disembarking from a black SUV in a pair of red-bottomed Louboutins. “FLOTUS is hands on, rising at 6 a.m. and often continuing with her work until 1 a.m.,” read a caption beneath a photo of a jeans-clad Melania examining an iPad on the President’s private jet.
(https://archive.is/9EhFQ