The White House has set records with its rate of staff turnover, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders left another spot open when she announced on June 13 that she would leave her post as press secretary this summer. Her seat won’t be empty for long.
This week her replacement was announced. On Tuesday, Melania Trump shared that someone from her own team—Stephanie Grisham, her deputy chief of staff and communications director—would replace Sanders and handle press issues for the president and his administration.
In a rare move, Trump followed her husband’s example and announced the news on Twitter. “I am pleased to announce @StephGrisham45 will be the next @PressSec & Comms Director! She has been with us since 2015 – @potus & I can think of no better person to serve the Administration & our country. Excited to have Stephanie working for both sides of the @WhiteHouse. #BeBest,” she wrote.
President Trump also discussed the news with reporters and called Grisham a “fantastic” choice for the role. “Stephanie has been with me from the beginning,” he said. “A lot of people wanted the job; a lot of people wanted to do it. I’ve asked people, ‘Who do you like?’ and so many people said Stephanie. She’s here, she knows everyone, she actually gets along with the media very well.”
Grisham is one of the rare officials who have been with the Trumps since the 2016 campaign, and she’s had multiple roles within the administration. She previously worked as a deputy to former press secretary Sean Spicer, who resigned in 2017. She’ll be Trump’s sixth press secretary in three years.
During her tenure on the First Lady’s team, Grisham emerged as an outspoken and controversial force who often responded to criticism directly on Twitter, much like her new boss. She took issue with the media focusing on Melania Trump’s “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket, and defended Trump amid criticism that her antibullying campaign was at odds with her husband’s inappropriate and misogynistic rhetoric.
“I think that, honestly, one thing really doesn’t have anything to do with the other, and she is focused on helping children,” Grisham said at the time. “She has said many times that her husband is an adult, he’s the president of the United States, he knows what he’s doing, and she’s focused on Be Best, she’s focused on children. Children are the ones who are impressionable right now, and so she’s going to go out there and do the best that she can to help them succeed.”
The room is full of suits and ties waiting at attention. The Aunts surround the left wall. The floor in the back is covered in boots ready to march. But all you see is red. There, in the center, 250 Handmaids’ gowns hang limp, lifeless in a row; rustling only when the breeze of someone rushing over to the Marthas whisks by. There’s only one exit, and between you and it lies Melania Trump.
With how much The Handmaid’s Tale—Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel—blurs with the political landscape of 2019, this scene doesn’t sound like it’d be out of place in the show’s third season, which premieres today, June 5. The wives of Gilead in many ways resemble what Melania and Ivanka Trump have come to represent: women who uphold a ruthless patriarchal society, yet are oppressed by it at the same time. (In other words, the 52 percent.)
But in reality, I’m standing in the middle of the show’s gigantic storage closet at its set in Toronto. It’s mid-April, and the costume department just got through one of its heaviest design sprints: hundreds of Handmaids’ dresses, 54 Wives’ gowns, and a handful of sharply tailored teal blue looks for Serena Joy Waterford, the Commander’s formidable wife. And still, the designers have work to do. Today, they’re sewing outfits for the Jezebels. Then it’s back to focusing on Serena’s closet. (As for Melania, we’ll get to her soon.)
“Serena is my favorite to design for,” Natalie Bronfman, the show’s lead costume designer, says as she points to a wall in her office covered in sketches of blue gowns. “I take a lot of elements from the late fifties and early sixties as inspiration. The real clean, shaped stuff. Then I mix them in teal.”
It’s not just the box-pleats or angular necklines that makes designing for Serena a costumer’s dream. It’s her complexities—like tormenting a postpartum June for running away and giving birth in an abandoned country home; then turning around to set June and baby Nicole free from her womanizing husband and Gilead’s archaic rules.
“Costume says so much,” Bronfman says. “It tells where you’re from, what your economic status is, what your mental status is. That’s all there in how and what you wear. People tend to write it off as ‘just clothes’—but it’s not, actually.”
Serena’s pivotal moment in the season two finale, where she gives away baby Nicole.
George Kraychyk/Hulu
Season two had plenty moments that made you think maybe Serena isn’t the monster we thought she was, only to turn right around and confirm that, yeah, she really is the worst. (Well, maybe next to Aunt Lydia.) Season 3 delivers even more of that “Will she? Won’t she?” pit-in-your-stomach anxiety—and, without giving away any spoilers, her mental state is often reflected in her clothes.
But wait, let’s back up: You’re probably curious about what the hell Melania was doing in the costume department? I was too. In fact, I was shocked when I saw images of the Trump family hanging up in a few different places around the room. (Unfortunately I can’t share pictures of these mood boards, due to spoilers.)
“Oh, that?” Bronfman laughs when I point out the photo of Melania hanging on the exit door. It’s that now almost too apt meme of the First Lady walking down a hall of the White House’s dystopian red Christmas trees. On top of each one sits a crisp white, photoshopped bonnet.
“That was right at Christmas and somebody sent it to us, so we put it up because we were in the midst of building all of these Handmaids’ dresses,” she says, gesturing to the 250 capes in front of us.
It’s Melania Trump‘s birthday, and the White House decided to celebrate by posting a photo of her on social media. “Happy Birthday, @FLOTUS,” the White House wrote on its official Instagram and Twitter pages.
But of course the Internet couldn’t let well enough alone. People on Twitter immediately started turning the photo WH chose into memes. After all, the pic was an interesting choice. It’s of Trump sitting on the far end of a couch, alone, as dozens of paparazzi take her picture. There wasn’t a cute headshot the White House could have posted? A candid? Just this couch photo?
Check it for yourself below. I’m not surprised the memes are rolling in.
Here are just a few (very funny) examples.
This isn’t the first time Melania Trump has been at the center of a White House meme. Remember over the holidays, when people were freaking out over the red Christmas trees the Trumps picked as decorations? Those memes still slay me, TBH.
According to People, Donald Trump said last year he didn’t get a big birthday present for Melania because he was too busy.
“Well, I better not get into that because I may get in trouble,” the President said on Fox & Friends, per People. “Maybe I didn’t get her so much. I tell you what, she has done—I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy to be running out looking for presents, OK! But I got her a beautiful card and some beautiful flowers.” He did, however, give Melania a shout-out in an email campaign. “Melania is my rock and foundation, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today without her by my side,” he wrote at the time last year.
This is Melania Trump’s third birthday in the White House as FLOTUS.
Ivanka Trump has caught a lot of flak for refusing to speak out about controversial issues like family separation, despite positioning herself as a champion for women and children. On Wednesday night at the House Democrats’ annual retreat, Chrissy Teigen become the latest celebrity to put the First Daughter on blast, noting that Trump continued posting photos of her kids on social media while immigrant children were being removed from their parents as a result of her father’s policies.
Alongside her husband, John Legend, Teigen spoke with former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry and explained that the images of children separated from their parents because of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the border deeply affected her. “It’s a painful thing to see that, and it’s a painful thing to see such a complete lack of empathy,” she said.
Teigen then pointed out that Ivanka Trump had published images of her son on Instagram when the family separation crisis was at its peak. The photos were criticized as tone-deaf for appearing at a time when thousands of immigrants were trying desperately to reunite with their own children.
“When it comes from people, like Ivanka, I will say, that can post all day pictures of her children that are just in her home and ‘Oh, my daughter is having trouble in her crib’ or ‘My daughter is doing this’ and ‘My daughter is doing this,’ there are children out there that don’t have that opportunity,” Teigen said.
Last August Trump finally spoke up and called the family separations a “low point.”
“I feel very strongly about that. And I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children,” Trump said at an event with the news site Axios. However, many people on social media wondered why she hadn’t been more vocal when the crisis was unfolding.
Since Donald Trump was elected, Teigen has been a forceful critic of his on Twitter. At Wednesday’s event, Legend joked that his wife “was ahead of the curve on making fun of Donald Trump.” Still, Teigen did leave the audience with one word of advice not for politicians, but for women: Harris-Perry asked her what word she hoped women would use more frequently and Teigen blurted out, “Fuck you.” The crowd broke into laughter, and Teigen quickly added, “You don’t have to say it…. It is not a word; it’s not a sentence. It’s a mind-set.”
Trends come and go, but in politics, fund-raising off an opponent’s snafu never goes out of style.
Critics pounced last week when First Lady Melania Trump set off for Texas in a military-inspired $39 Zara jacket with “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” boldly printed on the back. Observers called her choice of dress for the trip—a visit with migrant kids separated from their parents at the border—everything from confusing to tone-deaf or worse.
As Trump detractors saw red, the Democratic National Committee saw a chance to make some green.
Within hours of Thursday’s dustup, the party’s online store was hawking T-shirts with a clapback aimed squarely at FLOTUS: “We Care, We Vote. Do U?” A few days later the olive-drab tees—priced at $20.18 in a nod to this year’s midterm elections—had become “by far” the best-selling DNC store item of all time, a party official told Glamour.
As of Sunday afternoon, the DNC says, visits to its online store had spiked by 2,000 percent, overall sales were up 7,700 percent, and the party had moved around 2,800 “We Care” shirts—or about $56,000 in sales. By Monday morning that was up to 3,200 shirts and more than $65,000.
The promo for the shirt is itself a jab at Team FLOTUS for insisting the jacket was, in fact, just a jacket. “When it comes to the words we put on our clothes, there is ‘no hidden message,’ We like to keep it pretty straightforward,” says the DNC site, adding that the tee is “printed on 100% preshrunk cotton—right here in the USA.”
While a spokeswoman for the First Lady said her attire wasn’t telegraphing any kind of message, the people snapping up the T-shirts want to do exactly that, according to DNC women’s media director Elizabeth Renda: The tees “are selling quickly because voters are disgusted with Trump’s shameful immigration policy and this White House’s blatant disregard for the children who they are using as bargaining chips,” she told Glamour in an email exchange.
The FLOTUS team also tried to tamp down the jacket hubbub by saying the press would do better to focus on the time she spent with kids in Texas than what she wore to get there. The President himself, however, further stirred the pot by tweeting that the message on his wife’s back was meant to show her lack of regard for the “fake news media.”
Asked about the DNC’s latest marketing move, Stephanie Grisham, communications director for Mrs. Trump, who on Sunday made a surprise address at a student leadership conference, told Glamour she’s “glad the First Lady has stirred up conversation through fashion, because she certainly cares about helping people.”
Grisham added via email that “while they are obviously doing this to portray her in a negative light, I hope any money the DNC is making from this will be donated to a good cause.”
The national uproar over the separating of immigrant families at the border, of course, started well before the recent tizzy over FLOTUS’ flight gear. Fueling the public and political furor: Reports describing anguished children crying for their parents and being held en masse in cages of chain-link fencing.
A CBS News poll released Sunday found 53 percent of American adults strongly opposed to breaking up parents and children trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Only 11 percent strongly favored the separations.
The poll underscores why the DNC would want to capitalize on anything that could peg the Trump Administration and its allies as callous on immigration as the GOP fights to keep control of Congress. While just over half of those polled for CBS said the family separation controversy was not changing their views on voting, 28 percent said it makes them more likely to consider backing a Democrat in November, outstripping the 19 percent who said they’d be likelier to look at a Republican.
Melania Trump—an immigrant herself—first publicly expressed dismay about the separations in a carefully worded statement on June 17. On June 20 her husband signed an executive order to keep border families together. The next day FLOTUS was off to Texas.
She was only glimpsed in the now-notorious green jacket, but that was all it took for the former model to inspire a new kind of statement piece: Brands stampeded to roll out items with a “Yes, we care” counter-message, pledging the proceeds to pro-immigrant organizations.
By Saturday Portland, Oregon–based clothier Wildfang said sales of its new “I Really Care” line had brought in more than $200,000 to benefit the migrant legal services nonprofit RAICES Texas, pointedly tweeting, “Despite what Melania thinks, people really do care.”
That sum easily blows past what the DNC has so far raised from its FLOTUS-themed tees—and is itself totally eclipsed by the more than $20 million raised for RAICES in a California couple’s viral Facebook campaign.
While those campaigns directly benefit advocacy groups, the DNC, of course, is using its profits “to elect Democrats up and down the ticket in 2018,” Renda said—or in other words, to topple members of the party of Trump, weakening the president ahead of his 2020 reelection run.
Democrats won’t be going it alone financially this fall: Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of Trump’s hometown of New York, has vowed to spend $80 million or more of his own money to help flip control of the House.
Still, going strictly by the latest bottom lines, the Democrats may not be pooh-poohing even a small, unexpected windfall: The DNC raised $5.6 million in May, ending up with $8.7 million in cash on hand—and still, as The Washington Postnoted, $5.7 million in debt. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee raised more than $14 million in May and reported $47.4 million in the bank with zero debt.
Cassie Smedile, national press secretary for the RNC, responded to a Glamour question about the DNC’s new item with an implied hat tip to the hundreds of thousands of “Make America Great Again” Trump caps sold to date: “It’s telling that the Democrat Party’s best-selling product is about bashing the First Lady, while ours is about people’s hopes that America succeeds now and in the future,” she said.
By now, you’ve seen the photos of families crying at the U.S. Border, scrolled through the social media posts urging you to help, and possibly heard the disturbing audio that claims to capture children sobbing shortly after they’ve been separated from their parents at an immigration detention center. Yet you still might not fully comprehend the scope of the situation. Is there an actual policy that allows this to happen? Is it legal? Who is responsible?
The short of it: The current administration is separating families.
In April, the Trump administration took an unprecedented step and put in place a “zero tolerance” immigration policy calling for the prosecution of those who illegally enter the U.S. That policy, in the eyes of the administration, includes separating minor children from their parents at the border, regardless of whether their parents are attempting to seek asylum — which is not illegal — or attempting to cross the border for the first time, which remains a misdemeanor crime.
In doing so, the administration has separated an estimated 2,000 children from their parents, with each not knowing where the other is sent, and leaving an already burdened immigration system in what can only be described as in shambles.
And Trump’s constituents — the American public — are making their feelings toward this policy well-known by protesting around the nation, with many calling for the practice to be rolled back immediately after seeing images of young children crying along the border as their parents are detained. That includes former first lady Laura Bush, who wrote an op-ed calling the separation of families “cruel,” and even first lady Melania Trump, who said in a statement she “hates to see” children torn from their parents and guardians.
As everyone seeks to gain answers while watching the calamity unfold in real time, several truths have been lost and falsehoods put forth. Glamour.com spoke to several experts to try and make sense of what one called a “manufactured crisis” that so far, is doing exactly what it was meant to do: Cause utter and complete chaos.
FACT: The Immigration Law Is Decades Old, but the Policy to Separate Children Is All Trump
PHOTO: SOPA Images
A woman talks to a relative, separated by a fence.
In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy change (which differs from a law change) that would instate a “zero tolerance policy” for those attempting to cross the border into the United States. Prior to this policy change, anyone attempting to cross the border illegally was processed, detained, and sent back home.
Additionally, prior to the change, those attempting to seek asylum in the U.S. under both the Bush and Obama administrations were given due process, or those traveling with minor children, were detained, interviewed, released back into the public and expected to return to court at a later date to be judged based on the merit of their “credible fear” interview.
However, Sessions, and the entire Trump Administration, have now chosen to criminally prosecute anyone attempting to cross the border.
Period.
Now, when a parent is detained, their child will be placed under the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who is then in charge of placing the child with a relative, sponsor or in a shelter. This, administration officials explained, is meant to deter people from attempting to cross the border in the first place.
“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said while speaking to law enforcement officials in Scottsdale, Arizona. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”
But, Sessions is truly bending the limits of the law with his statement.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re seeking asylum, which is 100 percent lawful. They’re not treating it that way,” Alida Garcia, a former lawyer and current coalitions and policy director with FWD.US, an advocacy organization working for a more common sense immigration system, told Glamour. “So what we have is families that are arriving and many of these families are lawfully seeking asylum because [in their country] they’re in fear of gangs, they’re being persecuted in other ways, and they’re turning themselves over to border patrol because they’re trying to seek asylum. What this policy does is criminalize the act of a mother trying to save her child.”
FACT: The U.S. Is Violating the International Refugee Convention With Its Policies
PHOTO: LOREN ELLIOTT/Getty
A section of the US-Mexico border fence.
“Our policy is if you break the law, we will prosecute you,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said while testifying in front of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in May. “You have an option to go to a port of entry and not illegally cross into our country.”
And, to add more fuel to the confusion fire, on Sunday Nielsen tweeted, “This misreporting by Members, press & advocacy groups must stop. It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry.”
She doubled down on the those statements in Monday press briefing at the White House, saying “if you’re seeking asylum, go to a port of entry. You do not need to break the law of the United States to seek asylum.” When asked if people were being turned away from entry points, she said that was “incorrect.”
However, according to multiple reports, even from Garcia herself, those attempting to cross at official ports of entry, including bridges along the Texas border, are being told to turn back.
As The Intercept explained, immigrants who enter the United States, even by just a few inches, and share with immigration officials that they are afraid to return to their home nation have the right to request asylum and to be immediately processed, thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Once admitted, the asylum seekers then bear the burden of proof to show officials that by returning to their home nation they will be under great risk. If the person can prove, per the Immigration and Nationality Act that they are being persecuted based on “…race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” they could be granted asylum.
However, instead, these same people are now being detained or are simply being told that there is no room for them in the United States and are being turned away.
“These directives failed to mention U.S. treaty obligations that prohibit the penalization of refugees for illegal entry or presence—protections created in the wake of World War II, after many nations had treated refugees who sought asylum in their countries or who had invalid travel documents as ‘illegal’ entrants,” the Human Rights First organization shared in a statement referencing the 2017 executive order by Trump that prioritized the prosecution of immigration offenses. “In fact, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General warned in 2015 that the referral of asylum seekers for criminal prosecution may violate U.S. obligations under the Refugee Convention and its Protocol.”
FACT: The Zero Tolerance Policy Could Damage Children for Life
PHOTO: Stacey Leasca
Children awaiting asylum at a San Diego border entry point eat lentil soup and day-old bagels for dinner.
This isn’t just a legal issue, but a human, and humane one too, according to medical professionals.
Dr. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, explained to Glamour in a phone call while she made her way to the border, that the zero tolerance policy could have incredibly long lasting damage.
“Some real issues that we’re focusing on is that separating children when they are really young has irreparable harm,” Kraft said. She further explained, when children are taken away from their parents or support system that can create what is known as “toxic stress.”
“Very young children have this stress response, which increases their cortisol and their fight or flight hormones in response to fear,” Kraft explained. “When these children are exposed to scary things like traveling from their home countries to the U.S. or being separated from their parents, they remain with those chemicals high in their system. And they have no adult to buffer their stress, so they remain on red alert all the time.”
This, she said, can cause long-term damage including developmental delays in speech and the ability to develop social bonds. “If it continues, it can be a lifelong problem,” she said.
While visiting a government shelter for in Combes, Texas this spring, Kraft explained how she witnessed a small toddler forcefully beating her tiny fists on the play mat, sobbing uncontrollably. Her mother was nowhere to be seen because she had been taken elsewhere. (Because it’s against the Office of Refugee Resettlement policy, no adults were allowed to pick up and comfort the distressed child.) The event affected Kraft so deeply that she wrote an entire op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about it.
Kraft noted, “If there’s enough room to put kids in one place and parents in another, they have the space to house them together.”
FACT: Advocacy Groups Need More Help
PHOTO: Joe Raedle/Getty
Noelle Andrade (L), her mother Armida Hernandez protest the separation of children from their parents in front of the El Paso Processing Center.
To say that advocacy, governmental and volunteer organizations are stretched to their limits would be an understatement.
“They’re running out of space to house the parents, and then not being able to accommodate all the kids that are moved around the U.S. Then, you’re seeing operational challenges where [the Department of] Health and Human Services has so many people who are coming through their pipeline that they’re not prepared to handle,” Former Department of Homeland Security official Peter Boogaard explained to Pacific Standard.
Furthermore, people don’t know where to turn to help, and advocacy groups are even less sure of which direction to point people in.
“There’s a lot of people that contact us and saying, hey, we want to take in some of those children and we say, we’re not that agency. We’re not the agency that can help you with that,” Enrique Morones, founder and director of San Diego-based human rights organization Border Angels, told Glamour. Instead, what his organization does is both advocate for human rights and also pounds the pavement by dropping water and supplies at life-saving stations along the border.
But, in a single silver lining in this story, Morones says he’s witnessed an unprecedented level of human kindness in the wake of both the Trump presidency and with the implementation of this policy.
“When we started putting the water out in ‘96, we’d have groups of 30 or 40 people,” he said of the volunteer program to refill those life-saving stations. The Saturday after Trump was elected in 2016, Morones said, “we had 500.”
When asked if he ever felt like giving up, Morones immediately replied that he felt just the opposite. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. And I’ve never been more outraged. The children issue is just too much. It’s unbelievable.”
What’s Next in the Fight for More Humane Immigration Policies:
PHOTO: LEILA MACOR/Getty
A volunteer speaks with migrant families in a Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas.
According to the Washington Post, the American Immigration Council filed a lawsuit in 2017 to challenge the “alleged efforts by CBP in California to prevent asylum seekers from applying.” According to Astrid Dominguez, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Border Rights Center, the 2017 suit is tied to the administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy.
And, as Politifact reported, the United Nations human rights office has called for an end to the separation of families, noting that using immigration detention and family separation “as a deterrent runs counter to human rights standards and principles.”
On June 7, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced the “Keep Families Together Act,” which will do just as the name implies. So far, it has 49 cosponsors made up of Democrats and Independents.
“I know my dad and if I was at risk of dying, my father would make that journey to protect me,” Garcia explained when asked what she believed the biggest misconception of the current migrant crisis was. “And so I think, what the American public is missing is a little bit of empathy to understand that these are families living through immense crisis. These are families. These are women who have seen their husband killed, fathers who heard from gang members that their daughters will be raped and brought into their gangs. They’re doing what they can with the limited resources they have to try to save them. Seeking asylum is a lawful act.”
Garcia added, “I think if people took five minutes to listen to what they’re going through, they would want to speak with pride that America is a place that will welcome them with safety.”
Glamour reached out to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a comment on the conditions of the children in shelters. Our calls and email were not returned.
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