CHRIS CRUCIAL: Where's Melania?

PLUS: The most interesting man in the Senate

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1. ISO: Melania Trump

Donald Trump has broken a whole lot of rules — and flouted a whole bunch of conventional wisdom — during his eight years atop the Republican party.

He’s done so many formerly unacceptable things that we start to lose track. Witness the fact that his wife, Melania Trump, has been a totally nonexistent figure on the campaign trail or anywhere else this year.

This, from the Associated Press, is mind-blowing:

The former first lady noticeably did not accompany the presumptive Republican presidential nominee on any of the days of his more than monthlong hush money trial in New York. She was not there last month for the guilty verdict or the following day for his remarks at Trump Tower. She also did not appear June 14 at a 78th birthday party organized for Trump by his fan club, or at any of the campaign rallies he has held in recent months…

…The Associated Press reached out to 15 people who have been in major fundraisers or in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate recently. None said they had encountered Melania Trump on the Florida property.

Her office has not responded to several requests for comment. Her only public statement of late came two days after the Florida Republican Party announced with fanfare that son Barron Trump, 18, was chosen as a state delegate for the Republican National Convention and her office said he could not make it, citing prior commitments.

In a different age of the Republican party — aka 10 years ago — this would have been unacceptable. Male candidates — of both parties! — were expected to regularly appear with their spouses, a sign of how committed the entire family was to the endeavor.

For people other than Trump, that idea still holds. Remember what a big deal it was that South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott was single as a candidate for president this year? (He got married!)

And, Jill Biden is not only regularly at her husband’s side but has emerged as a major surrogate in her own right on the campaign trail. Can you imagine the drama that would be kicked up — especially in conservative circles — if Jill Biden was suddenly nowhere to be found on the campaign trail? Even she doesn’t think he should be president!, and all that.

Trump? Total pass! It’s fine that his wife is not only not on the campaign trail — ever — but also never even seen by his side or in the same state!

Perhaps aware of the oddness of his marital arrangement, Trump has shoe-horned Melania into his campaign stump speech. He regularly regales his crowds with tales of her watching his rallies on TV — hard to imagine since no network carries his speeches, in full, anymore — and criticizing how he looks or the size or the crowd or his imitations of Joe Biden. (It’s a rare moment of self-effacing humor for Trump.)

He’s also promised that his wife will join him on the trail. Asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker in September 2023 if Melania would start appearing by his side, the former president responded: “Yes. Soon? Yeah, pretty soon. When it's appropriate, but pretty soon.”

“Soon” apparently did not mean in the next 10 months.

And there are also reports that if Trump is elected again, Melania may not move full-time to Washington. Axios floated the idea recently that Melania would spend most of her time between Florida and New York — only coming to DC for “ceremonial undertakings like state dinners or special events.”

"Melania does what Melania wants,” Mary Jordan, a Washington Post reporter who wrote a book on the former First Lady, explained.

To be clear: Trump isn’t going to win or lose this election because his wife is nowhere to be seen during the campaign. (Sidebar: Melania Trump left office with 47% of people having an unfavorable view of her as compared to 42% who saw her in a favorable light.)

But, it is, well, weird. And would be the sort of thing that would occasion a whole lot of chatter — especially given that details about an alleged affair Trump had with a porn star just got a(nother) national airing — on Earth 1.0.

Republicans, however, have thrown themselves entirely in with Trump. Anything he says or does (or doesn’t do) is good because, well, he is saying and doing it.

The rules have changed. Or, more accurately: There are no more rules anymore.

2. The most interesting man in the Senate

Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman is hard to pin down. He pisses Republicans off plenty. But he’s also not a reflexive liberal — angering the online left particularly with his ardent defense of Israel.

I find him fascinating. (I’ve written about his openness about his mental health struggles.) Which is why I devoured this new profile of him by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker.

You should read the whole thing but here’s a taste:

A certain geographic specificity has been essential to Fetterman’s rise—if Donald Trump represented a Republican version of what the politics of industrial decline might look like, then Fetterman, a left-of-center populist from western Pennsylvania, could embody the Democratic one. He is six feet eight and thickly built, a onetime college offensive tackle with a shaved head, a prominent brow, and a laconic, watchful demeanor. No matter how formal the setting, he dresses in a hoodie and athletic shorts, a costume that inspired the passage of a bipartisan bill—the Show Our Respect to the Senate (shorts) Act—requiring business attire of every senator in the chamber. Fetterman’s wardrobe reinforces his populist politics, but it also has physical advantages. One of his former aides told me, “I’ve been in big-and-tall stores with him. It is impossible to find a suit that looks decent when you are that big.”….

…But the ways in which Fetterman is an ordinary politician have never been as useful to his Party or himself as his genius for finding the center of political attention. There is both art and labor to this. [Reporter] Igor Bobic said that Fetterman has a useful cynicism about the processes of power. “In a gaggle with twenty of us reporters,” Bobic said, “he is able to very quickly distill the absurdity of what is going on.” Tom Wolf, the former Pennsylvania governor, told me that Fetterman is willing to try things that no one else thinks to try. “He marches to the beat of a different drummer,” Wolf said. “But he can be very effective when he takes something seriously.”

I am not totally sure what to think about Fetterman and his seeming unpredictability. On the one hand, it’s refreshing not to know exactly what a politician thinks about every issue before he or she ever opens their mouth. On the other, Fetterman sometimes to appear as though he is most interested in doing the opposite of what everyone expects of him — just to do it.

3. Trump plays the debate victim

The debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden isn’t until Thursday. But, the former president and his allies are already trying to blame CNN and the debate moderators for being, uh, unfair.

Like, what? As a reminder: Trump and his team agreed to the network, the moderators and the rules of the debate, Utterly ridiculous.

Watch this video in which I sum the whole thing up. And subscribe to my YouTube channel!

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“I'm not going to talk about that.” — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem when asked whether she actually met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (as she claims in her book)

ONE GOOD CHART

Donald Trump spends a lot of time hitting Joe Biden on the campaign trail for ballooning our national debt. The thing is, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, it’s Trump who added FAR more to the debt.

SONG OF THE DAY

MJ Lenderman had one of the best albums of 2022 with “Boat Songs.” He’s back with his follow-up effort in September (can’t wait!). “She’s Leaving You” is the first song off the new album.

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