The Worst Lady

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Donald Trump is a terrible president, and he’s an even worse first lady.

 

Things are falling apart in Iran, oil has been back over $100 a barrel, inflation is still inflating, and the president is out there spending his time with … party planning and decorating. Dwight Eisenhower he is not.

 

Never mind that he is decorating badly—doesn’t this guy have other things to do? If he is not out there acting out an aneurysm in front of the White House press corps, he’s playing interior decorator and party planner, poking around at the edges of some low-stakes cultural stuff, and being the world’s most embarrassingly failed social climber.

 

Isn’t that the kind of thing for which presidents have, you know, wives?

 

“First lady,” if the ghastly term cannot be avoided, is the dumbest pseudo-office in our republic. The president’s wife has no legitimate special role to play in our national life for the same reason the spouse of the store manager who oversees the Walmart Supercenter in Williston, North Dakota, has no special role in managing the Walmart. They don’t give the managerial consort at Walmart the patio furniture section to manage as a goodwill project or anything like that: The manager manages and the spouse spouses. It is true that the job of the president of the United States and the job of a Walmart store manager are not precisely comparable: A good Walmart store manager earns more than the president, to begin with, and is expected to deliver real, measurable economic results, and probably is the one of the two you’d rather have helping out during a natural disaster or similar crisis, and he almost never shuts down traffic in Williston, North Dakota, by swanning around in an armored caravan acting out a fever-dream Roman triumph as imagined by the faculty of École Philippe Gaulier.

 

But we Americans have been trying to give ourselves an ersatz king ever since we gave the ol’ heave-ho to the last real one. (“Real.”) For every Tarquin, there is an Augustus. And because kingship is simply an idiotically sacralized version of fatherhood at the national scale, the royal consort is almost as important as the monarch himself. If we are expected to think of the president as “America’s dad,” in the formulation for which John Kasich probably ought to be stripped of his citizenship and deported, then the so-called first lady—you’ll search our founding documents in vain for any mention of such a title—is America’s mommy.

 

Gross, right?

 

I do not much blame Melania Trump for not really wanting the job. That is not her traditional line of work. She takes a plainly transactional view of her marriage: Asked by an interviewer if she would have married Donald Trump if he were not rich, she cynically asked whether he would have married her if she weren’t beautiful. The third Mrs. Trump is said to have wept—and not for joy—when it became clear in 2016 that Trump had, bizarre as it is to put the fact into English words, been elected president of these United States. You’ll remember the evening: In 2016, Trump beat out Bill Clinton’s wife and has been trying to prove that he is a better first lady ever since. It is a pity that Harris Glenn Milstead won’t be around to play him in the definitive biopic.

 

(One wonders whether the accomplished daughter of Prof. Radhakrishna and Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri also gets weepy when she thinks about whether she really signed up for this—and the “heritage American” stuff, too.)

 

If Jackie Kennedy was the ideal first lady—rearranging the china cabinet while her husband was out failing to rearrange China and the Cabinet, tough things to do when your schedule is taxed by an extramarital “two-girls-a-day routine”—then Mrs. Clinton surely was the worst of them, derailing her husband’s first term by inserting herself into a national fight over healthcare and health insurance that proved too complex and demanding for her modest abilities. Like Darline Graham Nordone, Mrs. Clinton was presented with the gift of a Senate seat as a tribute to the career of a shifty male family member who never let himself get tied down by the bonds of matrimony, and then she was humiliatingly defeated by inexperienced tyros in every election she contested for another office. But, oh, what a time the 1990s were: Every time Mrs. Clinton tried out a new hairdo, it was a front-page headline.

 

The big lesson from the Clinton administration: Relative peace and 297 percent return on the NASDAQ will buy a big creep a lot of goodwill. President Trump, a considerably bigger creep, has jumped combover-first into a 1970s-style stew of inflation intensified by unpopular—and failed—warmaking. And so Trump is out painting the town.

 

Literally.

 

Among his other Louis XIV-meets-American Psycho efforts at beautifying Washington—hell of a job with that reflecting pool, you [13-letter expletive participle deleted] incompetents!—Trump proposes to paint the Eisenhower Building, a perfectly fine old stone pile that is reasonably inoffensive by the standards of the hideously crypto-fascist grotesquely bloated Brutalist imperially pagan capital pseudo-city. The Eisenhower Building is granite-colored, on account of its being made of granite; Trump proposes to spend millions of dollars to make it white, like the people he prefers to rent to. Why? There’s the obvious thing—that he really is a short-fingered vulgarian who will work overtime to make things ugly whenever and wherever he can, even if that means giving all of Washington a case of architectural Mar-a-Lago face.

 

But one wonders if much of this is not the reality-television grotesque’s instinct for trying to manage the storyline. Not only the dopey decorating projects but the new round of tariffs that are likely to go nowhere and the various minor psychodramas of midsummer—Trump very much seems like he is attempting to gin up some relatively low-stakes controversies to distract Americans’ attention, or at least divide it, lest in the muggy dog days they start thinking too deeply (I know, I know) about the fact that the president has launched an open-ended and failing war in the Middle East, apparently because he thought it would be as easy and as cost-free as murdering boatloads of Latin Americans on the high seas for … some reason. A fair number of Trump voters—including some in his ride-or-die demographic—have had enough. Republicans can be on Fox News all day calling Colorado Gov. Jared Polis a Marxist, but it isn’t the governor of Colorado who promised to get a handle on inflation and then helped to jack up the price of filling up an F-250 to $200. And Trump would rather be having smallball fights over first lady stuff than reminding Americans how bad he is at being president.

 

First lady? Worst lady.