You are not alone: Melania Trump tells Americans who had lost their loved ones to virus
WASHINGTON: “Her words.” That’s the message that aides to first lady Melania Trump have underscored before her headlining speech Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention. Trump’s address, delivered live from the newly renovated Rose Garden, would be “authentic,” written without the hidden hand of professional speechwriters. “Every word” of the address, Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham said, “is from her.”
It was a necessary rebuttal to Trump’s disastrous appearance at the RNC four years ago in Cleveland, where she had discarded a speech prepared for her by two prominent conservative speechwriters and instead ended up borrowing word-for-word phrases and themes from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention eight years earlier.
But for a first lady who for the past four years has chosen to be seen more than heard, sometimes letting her clothes (a jacket, most infamously) do the talking, a major speech where she shares her own thoughts about her husband’s presidency was more than just an opportunity for a do-over.
The typically private first lady used it as an opportunity to acknowledge the lives lost to the coronavirus, in the middle of a convention where most of the speakers were addressing the pandemic in the past tense and rarely mentioning the national toll. And she tried to reframe the Trump presidency in a more moderate and empathetic light.
Speaking directly to Americans who had lost a loved one to the virus, Trump told them, “you are not alone.” She acknowledged that “the invisible enemy swept across our beautiful country and impacted all of us.”