I noted this yesterday but the Times has an excellent editorial out today. And what it tells us is pretty ******* ugly, if expected.
Quote:Melania Trump Inc. Imperiled
President Donald Trump and his family have done little to assuage concerns that they see the White House as a cash cow. The president has bucked tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. He ignored pleas from the Office of Government Ethics, which called on him to fully divest his holdings in order to avoid dragging mounds of conflicts of interest into the Oval Office. The president’s adult sons have been busy working on projects at home and abroad now that the Trump name opens more doors than ever. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, conspicuously wore a piece from her jewelry line in a postelection interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
But any veneer of plausible deniability about the Trump family’s greed and their transactional view of the most powerful job in the world was shattered this week by a defamation lawsuit the first lady, Melania Trump, filed. Mrs. Trump is suing The Daily Mail’s website in New York State court over a story published last year that included a baseless claim that the former model once worked as an escort. Mrs. Trump is certainly entitled to challenge the accuracy of that allegation and to argue that it was defamatory.
But her assessment of the damage the claim has done to her earning potential is galling, and revelatory. As a result of the report published in August, Mrs. Trump contends in the suit, her “brand has lost significant value, and major business opportunities that were otherwise available to her have been lost and/or substantially impacted.” The suit offers no specific examples of lost business opportunities.
The timing of the story was particularly injurious, according to the lawsuit, considering that Mrs. Trump “had the unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as an extremely famous and well-known person, as well as a former professional model and brand spokesperson, and successful businesswoman, to launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multiyear term during which plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.”
There is no benign way to look at that claim. Mrs. Trump evidently believes her new title affords her a chance to rake in millions of dollars.
NYT
There are a couple of points to be made here aside from the blatant greed of this family and the vulgar use of the office for making money while the office is held. One is more obvious and the other less so.
First, the obvious point. Right wing media rather constantly indicted Michelle Obama for her advocacy of healthier diets for America's children. The complaint was that in acting in such a manner, Michelle was (somehow) degrading Americans' liberty through improperly inserting her "politically correct" values into the lives of Americans therefore (somehow) making those lives less free. It was an insane claim but they made it constantly and yelled it loudly. But this matter of Melania Trump (and family) using the office to increase their "brand" value and make money - that will without doubt gain no criticism of any amount or significance in right wing media.
The less obvious point to be made relates to the what you would think to be a fatal PR mistake made by Trump's legal people in pushing the suit in the way they did and
with the language of it. There is no attempt to disguise the money-motivation, it is absolutely explicit. How could it be possible that the Trump team didn't catch this and stop it or censor it or try to make the wording less transparently predatory?
It is possible that there was no thought given by the lawyers in the case to political consequences. It's possible that Trump's team is so maladroit that they didn't see this coming. But I doubt it. Because this is not unusual for how they are going about things.
The reigning narrative is "We won the election. That gives us licence to do as we want. We won as rogues against establishment values. We're going to change how DC works. Americans gave us this power with their votes. We will now do as we like because that's what Americans sent us here to do. We can stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot people and there will be no consequences from our supporters (and we won in a landslide). So to all the fake media with their fake news and their loser whining we say - **** You. We are in power, not you.
