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Defiant Melania Compares Her Low-Rent Nudie Photos to Michelangelo’s David and People Are Having a Field Day

It looks like she's getting out in front of more possible controversy in her memoir.

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Melania Trump is a smart woman, in many ways. That can be hard to keep in mind, since she’s still married to a felon who cheated on her when she was pregnant with his child.

But despite Donald Trump’s extensive help in getting her the eventual citizenship she has now, she was largely a self-made woman before she met the future president.

That is to say, she was able to best use what she was biologically blessed with.

Her natural good looks — flowing hair, high cheekbones, and dazzling eyes — combined with a little surgical enhancement led her logically to the world of modeling. But after stints in Paris and Milan and finally Manhattan, the runway was no longer paying the bills.

Melania turned to the method that many models hold off from until their last resort: Nude photoshoots.

She first modeled in the buff for a now-defunct French men’s magazine, akin to America’s Playboy: Not too explicit, but fully nude, in a publication intended for sale to adults only.

After she started dating Donald Trump in 1998, she once again appeared nude in a series of photos on his airplane, this time less focused on men of a single mind, and a little more artistic — or as artistic as one might look naked aboard Donald Trump’s airplane.

Now, in advance of the release of her memoir, Melania, she’s put out yet another self-narrated ad on her X account, this time “standing proudly” behind her decision to bare it all back in the day.

During the ad, she begins with a question and ends with a declaration of pride in the human form:

“Why do I stand proudly behind my nude modeling work? The more pressing question is: Why has the media chosen to scrutinize my celebration of the human form in a fashion photo shoot?

Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body? Throughout history, master artists have revered the human shape, evoking profound emotions and admiration.

We should honor our bodies and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self expression.”

Interspersed with her voice are rotating images of classical art pieces depicting female and male nudity: Lady Godiva by John Collier, Aphrodite under a tree in marble, Michelangelo’s David, all set to a beautiful soft piano score.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am all about celebrating the human form. Melania is correct, we should celebrate our bodies. But, and this may just be me, I do draw some distinction between Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and some augmented breasts lying on a couch in the pages of a magazine that comes with a brown paper sleeve around it.

One of these things is not like the others, as they say.

And it seems pretty obvious to me that Melania knows there’s a distinction, too. After all, there has been no renewed scrutiny of her nude photos for a good long time. It’s been about 8 years, in fact. To be blunt, Mel’s boobs are old news.

This seems like manufactured controversy that she’s cynically using to sell more copies of her book. The memoir hasn’t even been released yet; who knows? There may be prints inside of her glory days of wearing nothing but makeup.

I doubt that she’d include the airplane photos, however. Too much has already been said about Trump, airplanes, and naked girls.

This is just the latest in a series of short advertisements she’s done for the upcoming tome. She has variously promised a look into her own life, “the truth” about a number of things that happened during her years as First Lady, and even a retelling of the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, where authorities uncovered classified documents inside the Trump home.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this story is not that Melania “resorted” to nude modeling to further her career before meeting Trump, but rather that Trump has such a penchant for finding girlfriends (who became his wives) who were ALSO nude models.

He’s got a type, clearly.

Ivana Zelníčková, the Czech mother of his three oldest children (who’s buried on his golf course in New Jersey) was a nude model, and Marla Maples, mother to Tiffany Trump, did nude modeling before she was in TV and film.

In the end, Donald Trump was never after Venus de Milo. He’s been after women who didn’t mind baring their bodies for a guy who might not otherwise ever see a woman like that nude.

Watch her ad here:

People on Twitter had a field day:

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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