The Worst, Stinkiest Swamp Ever

UK tabloids-- as well as other tabloids-- live to point out the personal ugliness of celebrities and their hideous relationships. Remember when they were being sued for graphic stories about Melania's old days as a high priced call girl from Slovenia or Slovakia? These days they're more into stories about how Melania won't hold hands with her disgusting oafish husband. How British is this?

The frosty exchange was caught on camera as they landed at Palm Beach International Airport to visit survivors in hospital en-route to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.

This interaction comes just two weeks after Melania was seen storming past her husband as they landed in the same airport on their way to Trump’s golf resort.

Their marriage has been under scrutiny since it was revealed that porn star Stormy Daniels was reportedly paid $130,000 in a settlement before the 2016 election to remain silent about her illicit past with Trump.

Daniels alleged that she had an affair with Trump just months after Melania had given birth to their son, Barron.

On Saturday CNN was along for the ride: Why does Melania stay?. They refer to Ronan Farrow's New Yorker exposé that describes a string of extramarital affairs that Trump had while he was married to Melania, and refers to Trump's use of "clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs-- sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously-- out of the press."

There are plenty of reasons a woman may opt to stay with, or leave, a philandering husband (alleged or otherwise): financial dependency, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the kids, for status. Some of those reasons may apply to Melania.

But also, while men tend to be very territorial about their wives-- and are more distressed by the idea of her with another man-- women tend to be more territorial about a husband's attention and resources.

A woman who benefits from her husband's resources may have a harder time deciding to leave, even if she wants to. Studies show that wives who feel below average satisfaction in their marriage are more likely to leave if they are employed and that women were less likely to leave their breadwinner husbands than women who were the breadwinners themselves. For a woman who is financially reliant on her husband, the alternative to staying may, she imagines, be worse. For a host of reasons, men are less likely to think this way.

So how likely, really, is it that this unusual couple would divorce over all of this-- that Melania wouldn't stay?

Certainly, as First Lady, Melania already has done a lot to distance herself from her husband and create speculation that their 13-year marriage isn't exactly cozy. From the beginning of his presidency, she has been notably absent at important ceremonies, with Trump's daughter Ivanka appearing in her place. For the first five months, she remained at the couple's Manhattan apartment with their son, Barron.

... [I]t's quite possible she's not in a financial position to leave-- at least while ensuring herself the life to which she's become accustomed.

Some in the legal community have speculated that Trump's prenuptial agreement with Melania is likely very tight (he once said that it "made their marriage stronger") and that it's unlikely their prenup changed after he became President, even though the stakes for her staying were raised considerably.

Meanwhile, though, the Trumps seem to have gotten a pass from most of the media on a real Melania-related story, how her friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, made many millions of dollars from the poorly attended Trump inauguration, a day most Americans recognized even then as a day of mourning. As Maddow keeps reminding her viewers, Trump's inaugural committee is going to turn into one of the many criminal escapades of the Trump Era. And it paid around $26 million to an event planning company founded by a Melania's pal-- and, according to tax filings released on Thursday, far less than expected to charitable causes.

Trumpanzee crony and Inaugural Committee chairman, Tom Barrack, "had promised that the nonprofit overseeing inauguration events would be careful with its spending and donate remaining funds to charities." It didn't quite work out that way. That's a story yet to be told but the $107 million dollars the committee vacuumed up-- bribes to get on Trump's good side-- "only gave $3 million to hurricane relief efforts. It donated $1.75 million to groups that decorate and maintain the White House and vice president’s home."

Meanwhile, $51 million was split roughly in half between two companies. One of them was WIS Media Partners, a Marina del Rey, California–based firm started in 2016 by Melania Trump’s longtime friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a person familiar with the firm told the Times.

Wolkoff became a senior adviser to the first lady’s office after becoming well-known for planning society galas in Manhattan.

...Wolkoff personally got $1.62 million for her labor, an inaugural committee official told the newspaper on the condition of anonymity. Her company also reportedly paid the team used by The Apprentice creator Mark Burnett at the request of the president.

Remember, Burnett possesses lots and lots of behind the scenes tapes of Trump making outlandish racist and sexist assertions far worse than anything revealed on the Access Hollywood tape. Who will investigate the finances of Trump's Inaugural Committee? Only Maddow? It really needs to be looked at very thoroughly.

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