Remember, back in 2018, when Melania Trump visited a detention center housing migrant children, and inexplicably chose to make the trip wearing a jacket with the words “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” emblazoned on the back? At the time, the reaction was a deafening “What in God’s name is wrong with this woman,” on account of the fact that the garment appeared to send the message that she didn’t care about the plight of the kids who’d been separated from their parents thanks to her husband. In response, said husband insisted that the first lady was sending a message to the “Fake News Media” that she didn’t care what it said about her, a claim she later doubled down on. Yet according to a forthcoming book, the jacket’s message was actually meant for a party of one: Ivanka Trump.
In American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, New York Times reporter Katie Rogers reveals, per the New York Post, that Melania “spent her four years in the White House waging a war against Ivanka Trump,” with the duo engaged in an “internal power struggle” over the job of first lady, which the first daughter had attempted to fill when her stepmother delayed her move to the White House in 2017. Ivanka, Rogers reports, wanted to reorient the East Wing so that it served “the entire first family, not just the first lady,” a desire that chapped Melania’s hide and was not helped by the fact that Donald Trump told reporters that Ivanka would be “helping [Melania] and working with her.“ (“She was aware that her husband had suggested that his eldest daughter would be helping to share the responsibilities of being first lady, and this was not a development that pleased her,” Rogers writes.)
So by the time Melania made the trip down to McAllen, Texas, in 2018, she was apparently ready to tell Ivanka where she could go, through fashion.
Per the Post:
As New York magazine notes, “It’s unclear why anyone would look at a photo of the first lady wearing a jacket with a rude phrase scrawled across the back and think, Wow, she really put Ivanka in her place!” But who knows! Perhaps Ivanka was chilled to the core.
