The smallest snub can be the biggest gesture.

Newspapers report that Melania Trump has not reached out to Jill Biden to welcome her to her new home. Now, I suppose this isn’t surprising. Her husband has never admitted that he lost the election.

It may not be surprising, but it is deeply shocking. No matter what sorts of actions American presidents have taken on the national stage, their wives have had one job and one job only: to be gracious. 

First ladies have taken on many roles, from Jackie Kennedy’s promotion of the arts to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to solve our healthcare dilemma. But no matter what else they did, first ladies knowingly signed on to the job of being everyone’s First Lady. Their job has been to humanize their husbands, take over the care and nurture of the White House, make everyone feel at home in their home, and then pass the job on.

No American first lady has gone into the job thinking that she was moving into a permanent home. They knew that their part in the history of this country was a gender-determined role as homemaker, peace maker, she who keeps up the public face.

I’m willing to overlook all the other nasty gossip that came out about Melania Trump (though the recordings are a little hard to wipe from my memory), but this last gesture is a step too far. If the Senate doesn’t convict Trump of inciting sedition, they at least could convict him of having exceedingly bad taste in his [temporary] life partners.

The gossips say that Melania cried on election night, 2016. They say she didn’t cry tears of joy for her husband. She cried, I can only guess based on her subsequent actions, because she was actually going to have to extend grace to others. The world had always bent to its knees in front of her, and now she was going to have to do a little bending.

Apparently, even that was too much.

Women’s liberation is [almost] complete

Musing about Melania Trump leads me to look wider into the society of Republican women. I was raised in a conservative town and I know the unwritten code that conservative women follow. These women knew their place and they knew their role. They were the nurturers of children, the keepers of home, the supporters of their husbands, and sometimes, the movers and shakers of charity and social good in their communities.

Conservative women still love to dis feminism, but it’s clear that they have learned its lessons. Just look at the recent Capitol riots. Women can act just like men? The zip-tie guy’s mom went in to cause mayhem at his side. Women don’t have to be sweet and perfect? It was a woman who walked off with a computer from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Women should dress pretty? The women in that mob were almost indistinguishable from the men, dressed in t-shirts promoting hatred and division, red caps to hide anything they might have done to their hair that morning, even military gear.

Women used to talk sweet even when they were spewing the rawest hatred. No more. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s GOP convention speech? Well, I’ll just leave it at that.

The people who talk tradition trash tradition

So I circle back to Melania and then all the incredible breakage of norms perpetrated recently by Republicans. I can’t help but think that we are in a children’s story about Backwards World, where you wake up and everything you used to experience has been turned around.

In my childhood, it was the left screaming bloody murder at the establishment. It was post-hippie liberated women who took it on themselves to dress and act however they wanted. Conservatives were…conservative. They didn’t want change. Heck, the women had not even changed their hairstyles since 1958.

I can’t imagine those people I grew up with making any apologies for a band of hoodlums that entered the Capitol building and laid waste to it.

The Republican party is not the conservative party anymore. They don’t want to conserve the earth for their children. They don’t want to conserve decorum in our government. They don’t want to conserve the proper operation of our society.

“Whatever it is, I’m against it,” indeed.

As soon as the Capitol dust settled, they were back to using the word “unity,” as if they understood the term in the slightest. For years, the Republican party has gained power through insinuation, fear, and lies. You can say this about Trump, he does sometimes tell it like it is. He’s the one who said out loud that Republicans can’t win without voter suppression.

Republicans have realized that true conservatism has died a silent death. While Reagan courted evangelicals and Gingrich courted revolutionaries, the true conservatives became truly outnumbered in their party.

Republicans trash tradition because they are no longer conservative. They are liberal in the most general sense of the word: They want change. And the change they want is to do away with everything that has held this country together. They are against compromise. They are against fair representation. They are against loving their neighbors.

They are even against welcoming a new First Family into the White House. 

Really, has it come to this? 

I find myself inexplicably shocked and saddened by Melania not welcoming Jill into the home that the voters gave to her to keep and protect. It’s weird, because I think this whole First Lady thing is awkwardly archaic. I simply don’t believe that the role should exist. And in fact, I don’t really believe that the presidency, as it is currently defined, should exist either. But that’s the topic for another essay.

This essay is about sadness. The sadness of knowing that all across America, there are women who approve of Melania Trump’s behavior. They are readying themselves to snub their own neighbors. Maybe they will look across the aisle at a recently divorced mom and decide that her kids can’t play with theirs. Or they’ll look at the charity work they do and wonder if it’s beneath them, the way that such work is clearly beneath Melania Trump.

The fabric of conservatism is now frayed. Conservatism used to be a strong wall that liberals had to push against, thus strengthening both the left and the entire system as a whole. But now, instead of pushing back against tradition and conservative policy, liberals are pushing back against an angry, disillusioned mob who thought that the Trumps would pull them up by their bootstraps. 

Instead, the Trumps have pulled their followers down into the gilded muck where they have spent their lives, wrestling with the slick-skinned demons of their own creation.

It’s a made for TV moment, for sure.