After a long and unconventional delay, Melania Trump is joining her husband at the White House with their 11-year-old son on the president’s birthday, and promises it will be a celebration he will ‘never forget’.
The first lady and Barron are reportedly moving into the White House on Wednesday, which will be President Donald Trump’s 71st birthday, an occasion he’s been known in the past to celebrate lavishly.
‘I need your help to make it a birthday my husband will never forget,’ Melania Trump wrote in an email to supporters on Thursday, urging ‘loyal’ friends to sign a birthday card for her husband.
‘You have certainly proven yourself to be a loyal friend of my husband through your support of his positive vision to Make America Great Again and your unwavering commitment to the Republican Party,’ the first lady’s email added.
The arrival in DC of the first lady, who is described as ‘extremely protective’ of her husband in a recent Politico report, has White House watchers speculating that she could bring a measure of calm to a presidency convulsed by early controversies.
The move comes amid the seemingly endless barrage of self-inflicted wounds, damaging Russia-related news leaks, vicious White House infighting and other turmoil that have hobbled and distracted the Trump presidency since it set up shop in the executive mansion on January 20.
For Melania Trump, the move brings a sometimes reclusive first lady directly into the round-the-clock spotlight that is life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Melania Trump has mostly kept a low profile since her real estate mogul husband became president.
Arguably, her biggest public outing came last month when she and Trump visited the Middle East and Europe on a trip that the White House later praised as a resounding success for the political and diplomatic neophyte president.
Normally, when a new US president takes over, his family is an automatic component of the transition.
Michelle Obama and the then young presidential daughters Malia and Sasha were instantly, albeit discreetly in the case of the girls, a part of the new US presidential hearth.
But Melania is the first First Lady in modern history to delay her arrival in Washington after an election win.
During the week at least, Trump has been living alone in the vast, private quarters of the White House as he fends off the flood of reporting over Russia having allegedly meddled in the 2016 US election with the aim of helping him defeat Hillary Clinton.
His family’s arrival is not going to change much other than to give his marriage an air of stability, Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University who specializes in first lady studies, told Politico.
‘The move helps to give the impression that the president is currently in a stable, solid marriage and that his home life is under control,’ she said.
Plans for the president’s birthday celebration remain thus far under wraps, though Donald Trump has in the past commemorated the occasion in lavish fashion.
In 1988, for his 42nd birthday bash, a 15-foot spaceship zoomed from the stage of one of Trump’s former casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey amid flashing lasers, followed by a dance routine of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ re-written to honor Trump and a birthday telegram from then-President Ronald Reagan, the Washington Post reported.
For his 60th birthday at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, Trump went with a James Bond theme, complete with ‘Bond girls’ in skimpy bikinis.
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