What the Hell Was Melania Trump Thinking With This Zara Jacket?

An incredibly tone-deaf piece to wear while visiting children detained under your husband’s immigration policy.

Andrew Harnik/AP

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First Lady Melania Trump made a surprise visit to Texas on Thursday to take a first-hand look at the border crisis that has detained more than 2,300 children under her husband’s zero-tolerance immigration policy.

During her visit, she visited two facilities and shook hands with a group of detained children. But Trump’s concern for the migrant children was likely eclipsed by her apparel. The Daily Mail US reported that Trump, who is widely known for her carefully planned, high-fashion choices, was wearing a $39 Zara jacket with the words “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back. Many on social media initially expressed disbelief at the Mail‘s reporting—only to have it confirmed moments later by the first lady’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham, who noted that not only was the jacket real but that Trump did wear it to visit a detention center.

“It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message,” Grisham said in a statement. “After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope this isn’t what the media is going to choose to focus on.” 

As she left the detention center, the White House pool reporter caught Trump wishing the detained children, “Good luck.” 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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