Melania Trump is, to be frank, a boring person. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I myself am a boring person and can recognize my kind. But there is something almost robotic in the way she looks and moves and talks, like an animated mannequin, that makes you think that she is so tightly controlled that she will never do anything spontaneous or unexpected.

So it took observers by surprise when in an extraordinary development yesterday, Melania made a statement to White House reporters where she denied allegations and innuendos linking her to Jeffrey Epstein, and said that these were the products of mean-spirited liars trying to tarnish her good name. She also said that the emails exchanged by her with Ghislaine Maxwell were just casual correspondence. She also issued a plea for Congress to take public testimony from Epstein’s victims, which some of the victims and Democrats on the appropriate committees have seized upon.

The first lady also called on Congress to take sworn testimony in a public hearing from Epstein victims. Several victims did meet with the House oversight committee in a closed session last fall.

“We agree with First Lady Melania Trump’s call for a public hearing with the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Robert Garcia of California, ranking member of the House committee on oversight. “We encourage Chairman Comer to respond to the First Lady’s request and schedule a public hearing immediately.”

At the end of her five-minute statement, she walked away without taking any questions. You can see the full video of her statement at the above link.

What was baffling was why she suddenly volunteered this statement. The emails with Maxwell had been released way back in January. No one had been asking questions recently about her relationship with Epstein or about any other messages or images.

When people issue statements like what Melania did seemingly out of the blue, preemptively rebutting accusations that no one was known to be making, it is usually because they are aware that something damaging is coming down the pike and they want to get ahead of it. Most mainstream news organizations, if they are preparing to publish something that targets someone, usually contact that person and tell them the gist of the contents and ask for a response. This allows the target to sometimes take preemptive steps to try and minimize the damage. If this is the case, we will have to wait a few days to see if anything does surface.

But in the meantime, the rumor mills have gone into the kind of overdrive that occurs whenever something puzzling occurs. Trump launched the war with Iran at the instigation of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu but there have been suggestions that a side-benefit that was attractive for him was that it drove the embarrassing Epstein story off the front pages. He had long been arguing that coverage of this story should end. So there were even suspicions that Trump may have started to war just to deflect attention from the Epstein story. That would be a deeply cynical act but with Trump there is no bottom to his willingness to do things that harm vast numbers of people purely to advance his own interests.

But now Melania has put it right back in the headlines. Some are saying that here is something odd about the whole thing and suggesting that Trump may have put her up to it so that it would deflect from his debacle in Iran.

When Donald Trump launched a seemingly random war against Iran, there was a whiff of suspicion of a Wag the Dog ploy to divert attention from how badly the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was going.

So when Trump’s wife Melania made a mysterious appearance at the White House on Thursday to put Epstein front and centre again, was it an elaborate ruse to divert attention from how badly the Iran war is going?
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It was a barrage of denials that one might have expected from former first lady Hillary Clinton facing an ambush by Republican conspiracy theorists. But no one has been storming the White House demanding that Melania own up to her secret role in the Epstein class.

However, somebody, somewhere, is stirring up trouble, she claimed. “The false smears about me from mean-spirited and politically motivated individuals and entities looking to cause damage to my good name to gain financially and climb politically, must stop.”

So now we have the situation where Trump might have started the war with Iran to deflect attention from the Epstein files and then has Melania bring back attention to the Epstein files to divert attention from the Iran war. The Trump family and administration is so chaotic that this insane scenario actually is being taken into consideration.

In order to deflect attention from the charge that he put her up to this, Trump seemed to say that he was unaware of her intention to make this statement.

Jacqueline Alemany, a reporter for the MS Now network, tweeted that she called Trump who said he did not “know anything about” Melania’s statement prior to her appearance. He may be less than pleased that his wife just put one of his biggest political liabilities back on the agenda a week after he fired Pam Bondi as attorney general.

But that strains credulity. The idea that his wife would go rogue and do this without telling him would make him look bad in the manosphere, the world that he inhabits, so later the White House issued a more ambivalent statement.

There is no question that the Iran war drove the Epstein story from the mainstream news, with just late night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers trying to keep it alive. And now Melania has given them a lot of new fodder. Kimmel was dumbfounded by Melania’s action.