It’s been a week and a half since Donald Trump assumed office. While the spotlight-loving president has been front and center since then, doing prime-time interviews and signing executive orders in front of photographers, there have been few sightings of his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, in the public sphere.
After the inauguration, the conspicuously private Mrs. Trump quickly returned to her home in New York with her 10-year-old son Barron. While it was already widely known that the First Lady would remain living in her apartment at Trump Tower until Barron could finishes his school term in the spring, there are now reports that Mrs. Trump is considering holding off on the D.C. move indefinitely.
If this were to be true (and some sites rigorously attest that it is not), she would be the first First Lady ever to not live in the White House during her husband’s presidency. (Although Anna Harrison, President William Henry Harrison’s wife, never had a chance to properly move into the White House either, after her husband died from pneumonia only a month after his inauguration.) And while this might not come as a surprise for some—the Trumps aren’t known for sticking to tradition—the decision to stay behind in New York is not only unconventional, it could also end up costing taxpayers a lot of money. On Twitter, writer Ryan Chapman pointed out that the cost to keep Mrs. Trump and her son in New York was double the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts—an organization Trump’s administration is reportedly considering getting rid of alltogether.
While some might be able to understand the First Lady’s hesitance in uprooting her entire life and that of her son—it is, at the moment, a commendably modern arrangement, not to pick up and move everything because of a job—one hopes that the administration will come to find a better use of those funds. Plus, as the Obamas can attest: D.C.’s got great schools!
– VOGUE
