It’s a long established pattern at this point for the president to take to social media at what feels like every available opportunity. He live tweets Fox broadcasts, shares acutely pressing policy pronouncements — and, on Monday, he took to Twitter to share a message marking the fact that his wife, Melania Trump, was admitted to the hospital for a kidney procedure.
Just after 5 PM Eastern Time, the president tweeted a message reading:
‘Heading over to Walter Reed Medical Center to see our great First Lady, Melania. Successful procedure, she is in good spirits. Thank you to all of the well-wishers!’
The “successful procedure” undertaken Monday was a embolization procedure, the White House explained in a statement, which is meant to address issues like benign tumors and malfunctioning blood vessels. Johns Hopkins staff member Dr. Mohamad Allaf explained that he felt the length of the hospital stay associated with the procedure Melania had done this week means that the situation could be more “complex” than the White House let on. The first lady has been revealed to be set to stay in the hospital for the rest of the week.
As he explained it to the Daily Beast:
‘It is typically an outpatient procedure. People would get embolized and go home the same day or night. In the press release, it said she would be out for the rest of the week, and we’re on Monday. So to me, that implies that either the situation is a little bit more complex or perhaps, if it is an aneurysm or a tumor or a growth, it’s either complex or large.’
The president certainly did not share details as to clarify the exact nature of the first lady’s condition on Twitter.
The relationship of the president and first lady has been, in the public eye, fraying this year thanks to revelations of affairs the president allegedly carried on with while married to her. He allegedly had a brief affair with adult film star Stephanie Clifford — otherwise known as Stormy Daniels — just a short time after Melania gave birth to the couple’s son Barron, who currently lives in the White House with the president and first lady.
Another woman with whom her husband is alleged to have had an affair made the public gesture of apologizing to the first lady earlier this year. That woman — former Playboy model Karen McDougal — was successful in a bid to become free of an agreement with a Trump-aligned media company buying her silence on the issue of her relationship with the man who is now president.
In her own sphere of influence, the first lady has recently come out with an “awareness campaign” termed “Be Best” and meant to highlight issues of childhood well-being like the opioid epidemic and bullying.
The rollout of that program was tainted by the revelation that the first lady’s office was sharing as its own something that was essentially nothing more than a recycled Obama administration document.
The White House, in its statement marking Melania’s hospitalization, said that she “looks forward to a full recovery so she can continue her work on behalf of children everywhere.”
Check out Twitter’s response to the president marking his wife’s hospitalization below.
Featured Image via Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
