Is Melania Trump sending us a message through her creepy Christmas trees?

First there was the ‘I really don’t care’ jacket. Now there are her sinister decorations. What is she trying to convey?

There is something exquisite about Melania Trump, and I am not talking about her appearance or what she (probably) smells like. She doesn’t defy interpretation so much as beguile it; you want to strip away the layers, but you know you do so at your peril; the layers might be all there is. Mystery piles on mystery: who owns a jacket sporting the words “I really don’t care”, like the one she wore to a detention centre for child migrants? What binds her to her husband, a man whose proximity seems to affect her viscerally, and not in a good way? Can she really freeze human organs using only a look?

This week, all eyes were on her Christmas trees: why were they red? Why were there so many of them? How can something made out of berries look so creepy? Was opulence the problem? First ladies traditionally play down their wealth, whether for Democrat reasons (the ugliness of inequality) or Republican ones (ostentatious display, while not immoral, is at odds with being relied on to make your own biscuits). But this is an altogether different first family: they occupy high office; they run their own clothing company; they have email accounts on multiple servers; no one expects pretend humility and down-to-earthness, the standards of the old school. And Melania wouldn’t get out of bed to defy a convention that was already dead, let alone deck her hallways blood red for it.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ScoLbC