"Right-wing" commentators unfairly turned Gisele Fetterman into a "super-villain" to attack her husband Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., a "perspective" column in the Washington Post's Lifestyle section argued on Thursday.
Post columnist Monica Hesse insisted that conservative criticism of First Lady Jill Biden for encouraging her 80-year-old husband to run again and Gisele for her prominence during her husband’s Senate campaign following his stroke boiled down to nothing more than a lack of decency and ongoing sexism.
"It’s not hard to guess why pundits are going after Jill and Gisele instead of Joe and John. Attacking someone who is ill or elderly simply because they are ill or elderly is beyond the pale in our culture (for now, at least), even for those pundits whose flexible morals usually find a way to drain-snake around any barricades of decency," Hesse wrote.
She continued, "But by placing blame on the wives, these commentators get to spread harmful messages against the president and senator while having plausible deniability against charges of ableism. The commentators are not — heavens, no — throwing mud at these poor men. They are merely scolding the women who should know better. It’s ableism, with a little sexism, as a treat."
She concluded her Gisele article lamenting, "Women are to blame when they don’t retire. Women are to blame when they don’t get their husbands to retire. Women are to blame when they don’t stand by their man. Women are to blame when they stand too close. Women are to blame."
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Although Hesse took issue with commentators who attack politicians’ wives and women in general, Hesse herself has attacked wives and women in past columns.
In 2019, Hesse penned an article attacking Ivanka Trump for failing to change her father Donald Trump or speak out about his "behaviors and fitness for office."
"She is the single person on the planet whose public approval or disapproval of her father could possibly matter - to him, or to his supporters," Hesse wrote. "If she wanted to be thought of as a serious person, as a hero rather than a passive villain or cipher, she could have impact where she actually could have unique, meaningful impact."
In Dec. 2020, Hesse also published a column criticizing First Lady Melania Trump for her "very, very cold" and "perplexing" Christmas decorations every season. In Dec. 2019, she wrote a more lambasted article questioning whether Melania was "sending coded messages" in her public appearances.
"Is there symbolism in everything Melania Trump does, or not?" Hesse wrote. "Is Melania Trump playing five-dimensional chess against the rest of her checkers-playing family, or not? Will we ever know? Does it even matter? Does your pointed commentary about the administration’s immigration policy matter, if, to understand you’ve commented at all, the American public must intimately know the shopping habits of your grown stepdaughter?"
Although Hesse singled out right-wing commentators for attacking political wives and family members, many liberal mainstream media members have frequently attacked Melania Trump in the past, particularly for her personal style.
Former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald went so far as to attack Melania as a "foreigner" after renovating the White House Rose Garden in 2020.
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"It is a destruction of our history, something no other First Lady would have had the gall to do," Eichenwald tweeted, "This is the first time I have been furious that @FLOTUS is a foreigner. She has no right to wreck our history."
He later apologized and deleted the tweet.
