On a slew of occasions, First Lady Melania Trump and President Donald Trump have seemed less than cordial towards each other in public. The issue sprung up again just recently — when disembarking from Air Force One after a recent trip to New Jersey, Donald was caught on camera reaching out for Melania’s hand, and she seemed to completely ignore him. On a previous occasion, when the two of them were visiting Israel in 2017, she seemed to actively push his hand away during a similar interaction. Both incidents made an appearance in a montage that The Lincoln Project posted on Tuesday depicting some of the incidents in which Melania has seemed to publicly rebuff the president.
The Lincoln Project is an anti-Trump group of Republicans who’ve made splashes around the web with a slew of hard-hitting video ads targeting Trump. This latest video doesn’t have Lincoln Project branding in the actual content, so it may have originally come from another source. The montage includes a soundtrack of someone erratically singing “Don’t touch me!” over and over; check it out below:
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 18, 2020
Donald has, on his own time, displayed plenty of odd behavior, of course. When it comes to his relationship with Melania, in one particularly noteworthy example, a tweet that he posted on her birthday earlier this year didn’t even mention their marriage beyond the implication of her relationship to the president inherent in referring to her as the First Lady. It’s as if saying something more directly nice or personalized didn’t even occur to him — and it’s not as though Donald is a person who’s particularly known for keeping his thoughts to himself.
Happy Birthday to Melania, our great First Lady!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2020
While First Lady, Melania has largely kept out of the spotlight — although she did announce plans recently to renovate the Rose Garden, as if that’s where White House energies should be even partly focused during multiple national crises. An anti-bullying initiative called “Be Best” that she announced at one point hasn’t exactly gone anywhere — in a 2018 interview, she said that she “could say I’m the most bullied person on the world,” which is tone-deaf at best, to say the least.
Check out Twitter’s response to the Lincoln Project below:
