Yesterday, Melania Trump was dispatched to a church-run shelter for migrant children in Texas—skipping a planned visit to a real detention center—for a staged photo-op to try to take some attention away from all the bad press the Trump administration has garnered for its cruel immigrant child-separation policy. No one could argue with the optics of that...except that she also wore a military jacket with the words "I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?" emblazoned on the back.
Her communications director said "there was no hidden message," while Trump himself tweeted that the jacket was a response to the "Fake News Media." Was it a distraction? A cry for help? Was Melania trying to ruin her husband's photo op? Was it a deliberate ploy to enrage the libs and get someone to say something sexist about Melania? Or was it just another thoughtless, cruel gesture from a member of this administration?
Stephen Colbert couldn't even believe it was real when he first saw the photos: "We checked it so many times because we thought, 'This has to be fake.' But today on her way to show that she cares, Melania wore a jacket that says, 'I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?'" Colbert said. "That's what they settled on? What was her first choice? A jacket that says, 'Womp Womp?'"
None of the late night hosts could make heads or tails of the jacket. Jimmy Kimmel wondered, "Is the president now tweeting onto his wife's clothes?" and brought up the hypocrisy of the right: "Remember when Michelle Obama showed her bare arms and went to an oil spill, and Fox News went nuts? I'm sure they'll have the same reaction to this."
Seth Meyers had his own take: "You know a lot of people are giving her a hard time about it, but I think it's nice that she had a jacket made to display her wedding vows," he said. He also burned the FLOTUS flack who said the jacket had no hidden message: "It was literally spelled out," Meyers said. "That's like saying, 'If you play an Aerosmith song forwards, it contains hidden messages about love in an elevator.'"
Trevor Noah apparently was on the same wavelength as Meyers: "It is kind of sweet that she made a jacket out of her and Donald's wedding vows, that's really cool, I like that," he said. Noah also noted, "[It] looks like when Melania was in the hospital, she had her last fuck removed," and he added, "we could spend forever talking abut how out-of-touch this makes Melania seem, but I don't really care. Do you?"
And one last thing: Colbert pivoted from national politics to talk about the local politics around the "mystical kingdom" of Central Jersey. And he even got "the chief justice of the Garden State" Jon Stewart to weigh in on whether it is or is not a real place.