I had never heard of Melania Trump before her husband ran for president.  When I saw her descending that fateful escalator the night he announced his candidacy, I dismissed her as a gold-digger willing to exchange booty for fabulous wealth.  However, now after the first few days of this administration, I see her in a different, more sympathetic light, as someone brow-beaten into marrying that brutish, boorish buffoon.[1]

What a wretched life she must lead.  Imagine sharing a bed with Trump. His snoring, I bet, could provide a convincingly horrid soundtrack for Dante’s Inferno.[2]  Let’s face it, sleeping with Donald Trump, eating breakfast with Donald Trump, listening day in and day out to Donald Trump bloviating about how fucking wonderful he is has got to get really old really fast.

I’d rather be sentenced to 20 years riding on Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”

Melania’s Wiki bio makes it sound as if she had a stage mom, given that the future First Lady’s modeling career began at age five. Having a stage mom is bad enough, but having one in the former Yugoslavia certainly must have made it worse. Imagine coming home after an exhausting shoot to a dingy self-contained living unit in a soulless Soviet era high-rise lined up like a domino along the diesel stench of a poorly maintained highway. Plus, her old man was a Marxist-Lenin fanatic, which is probably just as bad (or worse) than being reared by a fanatical Christian evangelist.

If beauty were her ticket out, who dare blame her? Sure, she could have stayed in Milan and married a calcio[3] star, but certainly the lure of New York would be hard to resist.

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Wiki claims she met the future president at a Fashion Week party where she refused to give the lout her phone number because he had another date (or perhaps because he resembled a mutated, bulbous tangerine sporting a hairstyle that a Teddy Boy might find outrageous).

 

 

Eventually, she gave in – imagine the relentless badgering she must have endured – and for a while she had the good sense to break off the relationship after it had started. But let’s face it, Donald always gets what he wants — if you don’t count the respect of Hollywood or the intelligentsia or at the present moment, 55% of the US population.

No doubt you’ve witnessed her daily humiliations, and if you haven’t, allow me to share two telltale images.

Not surprisingly, #FreeMelanie is now a meme on Facebook and Twitter, and I think her escape from the White House could make a killer pulp thriller if you changed the names and set it in the future. You could have her fall in love with a secret service agent or kidnapped like Patty Hurst and go rogue by helping her abductors knock off unqualified cabinet members.

Or how about a Greek tragedy with a CNN panel serving as a chorus?

Certainly, there’s a budding Dostoyevsky out there who could capture her feline Slavic beauty and concoct some redemption for her suffering in a 600-page novel.

I personally don’t know – and I’m serious – any sane woman who would trade places with her.

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[1] I realize the too-too muchness of that relentless B-alliteration, its amateurish boom boom, but, people, I’m trying to echo Trump’s own crudity and amateurishness, so give me a break!

[2] For the sake of your and my own sanity, I’ll spare us a description of what I envision the “ol’ in-out, in-out” with Donald Trump might be like.

[3] I.e., soccer