He started it!” Donald Trump said Sunday, on “This Week.” Those words have become a common wail in the dystopian playground free-for-all that is today’s G.O.P., but in this case Trump was explaining how he had come to tweet that he would “spill the beans” about Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and then retweeted a post arguing that there was no need for him to do so, apparently because the tweeter thought that Heidi didn’t look as pretty in a certain photograph as Trump’s wife, Melania.
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Technically speaking, though, Cruz didn’t start this, though he has taken it in unpleasant directions. Nor, really, did Make America Awesome, the anti-Trump super pac that, before the Utah caucuses, put out a Facebook ad directed at Mormon women featuring an old photo of Melania Trump posing discreetly nude (much of her body is concealed), on a fur throw.
The caption reads, “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” The person who started it, really, was Barbara Walters—though in a way she had also showed Trump how to end it immediately, if he’d wanted to.
Back in November, when there was still an expectation in many quarters that Trump would get bored and wander away, or that voters would drop him, in David Brooks’s memorable if puzzling formulation, like “a pink rug,” Walters went to Trump Tower to interview Donald, Melania, and the four adult Trump children from his first two marriages.
(Melania and Donald also have a son, Barron, who is ten.) When the segment aired, on “20/20,” Walters, who compared the Trumps’ apartment to Versailles, said in a voice-over that, if Trump won, Melania would have “two noteworthy distinctions: the first foreign-born First Lady since John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, and the first First Lady to have posed in a picture like this.” The screen filled with a photo from the cover of a fifteen-year-old issue of British GQ, taken during the same photo shoot as the picture Make America Awesome used. Then it cut back to Walters, seated with the Trumps, a concerned look on her face.
“I don’t know how to put this,” she said to Melania. “But your image, _looking** **_the way you do, is that a liability for your husband?”
“I don’t think so,” Melania said. She pursed her lips, as if it were a new idea, but she had picked up on Walters’s point quickly; she is a smart woman. “I think people will always judge. Maybe people will say, ‘Oh, the past that you have, the way you were modelling’—that’s part of the job I was doing. I was a very successful model.” This is a perfectly acceptable answer. Melania had, as Hillary Clinton put it in a different context, decided to fulfill her profession, one she entered before she’d ever met her husband. Melania continued, “And I did some photo shoots—yes, they were a little risqué, but nothing more than you see every day in Sports Illustrated.”