It’s no secret that there have been very few First Ladies in American history who boasted the distinction as ‘style icons’. And very few U.S. Presidents’ wives are compared to one another respectively nor catch the media’s attention based on their personal poise and glamour. However, when President Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro cited that First Lady Melania Trump is the “Jackie Kennedy of her time” it broke the mold and it garnished an ample amount of attention. And most of it, was not praise. Especially after the First Lady’s publicized radical renovation of the White House’s legendary Rose Garden- that Jackie Kennedy herself was responsible for creating back in 1962. The President’s advisor remarked, “I find her (Melania) to be the Jackie Kennedy of her time- the beauty, the elegance, the soft-spokenness..” during a televised conversation with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on the eve of the First Lady’s speech at the Republican National Convention back in August of 2020. Soon after, Peter Navarro’s positive comments sparked a Twitter firestorm and the backlash came from a garden variety of people.
A New York City based Twitter user who goes by the name of ‘Icculus The Brave’ posted side-by-side photos, one with Jackie wearing a cute, modest yellow gingham dress and the other pic was of Melania lightly clothed in a very low-cut risque bodysuit. The facetious post read, “Peter Navarro just told Andrea Mitchell Melania Trump is the Jackie Kennedy of our time…yeah I can totally see the similarities.” Another Twitter response angrily asserted that if Melania Trump was the Jackie Kennedy of her time, then porn star Stormy Daniels is the Marilyn Monroe of her time. Drawing comparisons based on the fact that John F. Kennedy and the iconic Monroe had an affair and that Donald Trump allegedly engaged in a dalliance with Stormy Daniels while his wife Melania was giving birth to their only child, Barron Trump. Former New York Times reporter, Kurt Eichenwald furiously said that Melania was a “foreigner” who has “no right to wreck our history”. A few other fiery people on Twitter declared that Melania had ruined and destroyed Jackie’s Rose Garden. And as one social media sage addressed it, “Under Jackie O, the White House Rose Garden was a beautiful and diverse menagerie of vibrant colors. Unfortunately, like all things touched by the Trumps — Melania Trump has turned the Rose Garden into a drab, unimaginative homage to white power.”
It’s something to note, not all the stark criticism unleashed at the First Lady via social media was just based on Peter Navarro’s casual remarks on a news broadcast. A tsunami of tweets fired off after President Trump referenced a comparison between the First Lady and the elegant Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis back in 2019. “We have our own Jackie O. today It’s called Melania.” His statement came after expressing a wish to paint his new Air Force One jet red, white, and blue instead of the usual baby-blue shade- a color choice instated by Jackie Kennedy back in the early 1960’s. “It was Jackie O and that’s good. But we have our own Jackie O today, it’s called Melania. We’ll call it Melania T. OK?” he blurted out on “Fox & Friends”. It was a no-brainer that Trump’s comments drew backlash. Tweets were hurled at Melania from pundits to the everyday Twitterati. Adam Best, owner of the podcast The Left, who is a stalwart critic of Trump posted a couple of pictures of the First Ladies on Twitter. One was of “Jackie Kennedy visiting suffering children” and the other snapshot was of Melania visiting the migrant children detained at the Texas border sporting her now infamous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” army green jacket. And another tweet that hurled attack toward Melania is a small business owner who goes by the name as @organicElena, posted that “she has been trying to emulate her in dressing. But that’s about where the similarities end. You can never become Jackie, Melania. Except on Halloween.”
