Melania Trump's team urges media to focus on First Lady's work, not her fashion choices

The national media should focus on Melania Trump's policy work instead of attacking the former runway model's fashion choices, the first lady's spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham told Just the News.

Grisham's plea, made Tuesday afternoon, prior to Mrs. Trump's speech that night to the Republican National Convention, has gained new resonance as snarky critics on social media have vied to outdo each other using green screen technology to project anti-Trump images onto the lime green dress the first lady wore to her husband's acceptance speech capping the GOP convention Thursday night.

"She doesn't compare herself to her predecessors," Grisham said in a video interview. "It's something I really admire. She doesn't feel the need to be front and center. I don't know if that's because she was a fashion model and was front and center all the time. Again, she just wants to do her work; to use her words, 'I want people to focus on what I'm doing rather than what I'm wearing.' As you know, fashion is what they seem to talk about the most." 

While Mrs. Trump has never received the fawning lifestyle coverage lavished on some of her predecessors by glossy women's magazines, that's fine with the first lady, according to Grisham, who said Trump prefers the media to focus on her work to help children through her "Be Best" initiative, prevent opioid addiction, serve military families, and other priorities. However, Grisham said Trump is routinely treated unfairly by the media compared to previous first ladies.

"She never talks about that," said Grisham, who doubles as the first lady's chief of staff. "I do, because I get very, very angry about it. It doesn't bother her at all. It is what it is. I don't want to do a blanket statement that they're all biased against her. But I mean, it is very obvious that her predecessors have been on many, many covers of magazines, and she has not. I guess the difference is she's been on covers as a supermodel. So we've got that going for us."

Tammy R. Vigil, associate professor of communication at  Boston University, documented the stark difference between how the media has treated Mrs. Trump compared to former First Lady Michelle Obama. “Unlike Michelle Obama, who earned mostly approbatory early coverage for her Let's Move! Initiative, her White House garden, and her numerous other activities, Trump gained attention primarily for her attire or for her occasionally unexpected behavior," Vigil wrote in a contribution to a communications textbook titled "Media Relations and the Modern First Lady: From Jacqueline Kennedy to Melania Trump."

"Throughout 2017, little was said about Trump's visits to schools and hospitals, but much was written about her wardrobe choices," wrote Vigil.

Mrs. Trump's trip to Las Vegas to comfort the hotel shooting victims and their families was attacked by the national media, Vigil noted. "Her trip to comfort survivors was cynically depicted as Trump performing a perfunctory duty and seeking a photo-op," she wrote.

In fall 2017 "rumors spread that Trump had hired a body double to stand in for her at public events," Vigil wrote. "The gossip undergirded the well-established narrative that the First Lady wasn't interested in serving the public in the manner traditionally expected of a president's spouse. Reputable news outlets picked up the story, and various late-night talk show monologues featured it as well."

Vigil documented how negative coverage of the first lady by the national media has continued throughout the duration of the Trump presidency.

Aware of the negativity in the press, Grisham called Trump "a very private person" who prefers to step away from the limelight to focus on serving others instead of battling the press as her husband does,.

"I think the way she does it is with just a really quiet dignity and grace,"  Grisham said. "And all she's interested in is getting the job done and helping kids. She really prefers to talk about what she's doing, what policies she's trying to get behind, or how she can help children. For her, it's truly not about her. She wants to help children. So I think that that is a lot of the reason that while people think she's got this mystique to her, it's just that she's all business and she wants to work and she doesn't want to talk."