Melania Trump has not been seen in public since May 10. The White House said on 14th that she’d undergone surgery for a “benign” kidney issue, but, according to doctors who have been interviewed in the press, the kind of procedure she’s said to have had wouldn’t have required such a lengthy recovery period. So, for the past 23 days, people have been wondering. And her tweets during this period, all of which seem to have been written by her husband, certainly haven’t helped quiet speculation that something might be very wrong.
I know there’s likely a very simple explanation – like that she hates the President, and has decided that she no longer wants to play the role of First Lady, telling America’s kids to “Be Best” while pretending to care – but, having just recently listened to the Martha Mitchell episode of the “Slow Burn” podcast about Watergate, I can’t help but wonder if maybe there’s something more to it. I mean, really, who would have thought it even remotely possible back in 1972 that the wife of Nixon’s former attorney general, could have been beaten, drugged and held prisoner by members of a presidential administration who feared that she might talk with the press about the Watergate break-in? But yet that’s exactly what happened. Of course, no one really believed her once she was finally let go, as she’d been labeled an alcoholic and a kook by members of the administration, but the truth eventually came out.
[Thanks to Mitchell, there’s now term in the psychiatric profession that’s used to describe when a patient’s accurate perception of real events are labeled delusional. It’s called The Martha Mitchell Effect.]
Here, from Medium, is bit of the story, for those of you who might not have heard it before.
…In the summer of 1972, Martha Mitchell was on the telephone in her hotel room in Newport Beach, California, when a security guard for President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign walked over and yanked the cord out of the wall. According to Mitchell, for the next 24 hours, the guard, who was working on orders from her husband, former attorney general John Mitchell, refused to let her leave. Every time she tried to escape, the guard caught her. Later she recounted, “From then on I saw no one — allowed no food — and literally kept a prisoner.” At more than one point, things got physical. Mitchell said that the guard, Stephen King, kicked her and, later, during one of her escape attempts, put her hand through a glass window, causing an injury that required six stitches. The incident was humiliating. Mitchell reported, “He came into my room while the doors were closed and I was undressed.” At some point, King called a doctor, who walked into the room without saying a word to Mitchell. He and King threw her on the bed and held her down while the doctor removed her pants and administered a tranquilizing shot to her rear end…
That security guard who beat and held Mitchell against her will, by the way, was nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate this past October to be our U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic… Yes, these are exactly the kinds of men that have sought to represent Trump’s America abroad.
Back to Melania though… As I didn’t appreciate it when people on the right speculated about Obama’s birth certificate, or Hillary’s health, I’m hesitant to engage in any armchair sleuthing about what may or may not have happened to the third Mrs. Trump. And I hope the comment thread accompanying this post doesn’t fill up with speculation about murder, plastic surgery or spousal abuse. With that said, though, I feel I’d be remiss, as someone who knows the story of Martha Mitchell, if I didn’t at least mention that, not so long ago, the wife of a prominent American politician was actually drugged and held against her will by surrogates of the president when they felt as though she had information that could harm the administration. And that’s all I’m saying… Nothing should surprise us.
Again, I expect that Melania is fine, but understandably fed-up. With that said, though, I do really believe that, by the time all of this is done, things will have gotten a whole lot weirder. And, as I’ve said before, it wouldn’t surprise me at all, given the kind of people in Trump’s orbit, if murder was eventually on the long list of crimes that we’re discussing… I don’t imagine, however, that’ll happen until the end of the first season, which is still a ways off.
