Today is Melania Trump’s 50th birthday and President Trump tweeted out Happy Birthday earlier to “our great First Lady.”
Happy Birthday to Melania, our great First Lady!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2020
The Atlantic and Conor Friedersdorf chose to mark the occasion by writing an article criticizing the Trump Campaign. He wrote about how he had received an email earlier this month that “appeared to be from Donald Trump” which asked recipients to sign a card for Melania’s birthday.
Ultimately he decided not to do so and wanted to “to send her a message” for her birthday through his article.
Friedersdorf suspected that “Trump and his RNC allies had ulterior motives when they sent that email––that they were exploiting the first lady’s birthday as a pretext to add to their databases.”
We wondered further if “the people working on behalf of Trump calculate that an honest request for personal information would be less effective than a ruse about a man wanting to do something nice for his wife’s birthday?”
His “suspicions only grew” when he found a message that personal information would be passed on to the Trump campaign and the Republican Committee.
He finished the article by saying that if his “best wishes would reach the first lady, and my impulse would not be exploited, I’d better send them independently. Happy birthday, Melania. You deserve better than the people around you.”
Friedersdorf is a frequent Trump critic on Twitter, like in one recent post where he called the President “out of his depth” in the “ongoing crisis.”
The GOP's active thwarting of the few people who tried to mount a primary challenge against Donald Trump has saddled them with a nominee shown by an ongoing crisis to be utterly out of his depth.
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) April 25, 2020
When he posted the article to Twitter, one follower of his pointed out that “the Obama campaign did something similar…” He shared an article that showed how an example of Obama’s campaign “asking Facebook supporters to sign a birthday card for the President.”
IIRC, the Obama campaign did something similar… https://t.co/yam9sY7Z54
— Seán Stickle ? (@seanstickle) April 26, 2020
A staple of the campaign engagement ladder these days.
In general, the mainstream media has largely ignored Melania’s birthday, although we were able to find one Yahoo Entertainment article which shared some tweets marking the occasion.
Earlier this year, many media outlets shared articles celebrating Michelle Obama’s birthday and even the Atlantic chose to mark that occasion by criticizing President Trump.
In a response on Twitter to criticism of his article, Friedersdorf said that it is “just one more example of political insiders being blithely disingenuous to Americans.” He said that we “should object to it rather than minimize it.”
Not horror, exactly, just one more example of political insiders being blithely disingenuous to Americans. You should object to it rather than minimize it.
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) April 26, 2020
In response to a question regarding his potential bias, he claimed that he has “plenty of objections to Democrats. I’ve written about them many times. Not every article can contain every objectionable thing.”
I have plenty of objections to Democrats. I've written about them many times. Not every article can contain every objectionable thing.
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) April 26, 2020
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