Melanija Knavs, Melania Knauss, MELANIA TRUMP, will be our First Lady of the United States, as her husband DONALD TRUMP was elected to be the next President and will take office in a few months.
Hungarians are not Slavs, but because Hungarians and Slavs have lived around each other for hundreds of years and intermarried, and in the United States this is especially true, we're considered to be the same people. (So listen please if you're reading this post in translation while living in Slovakia or Romania because believe me when I say that if you came here you would only be grateful to find another one of you and grateful to find some of the people you may think of as enemies there!).
Never before have we ever in THE UNITED STATES had a Slavic person in as high a position in our country as First Lady. In the American mind Hungarians, Slovenians, Slovaks, Poles and Russians - and all manner of Slavic people - have been in the popular mind in the same category; work-desperate legal immigrants who came in such high numbers a hundred or more years ago that their country of origins seemed vacated, not very intelligent and speaking strange languages.
In reading genealogy records of those Hungarian churches in towns in which so many people left during the Industrial Revolution, I have seen the notes, of children born while "father is in America," and of those children named AMERICUS! (Note September 2022. I've learned that this given name might relate to the English name Henry or Henrik. However, I've seen it barely used until the industrial age immigration period.)
Those hardworking men and women came and shifted from the agricultural economy that had sustained them to factory work and manufacturing, and ask anyone who comes from this background, they worked for pay but were closer to slaves. (Some people think the word Slav and the world slave are of the same root.)
Granted Melania Trumps legal immigration occurred in a different time in history.
On my commute home yesterday I switched on my not-so-smart phone and Googled "2016 Election," and up came the most incredibly useful site imaginable which was a map of the United States that showed the voting results as they came in, both popular and electoral college, giving each state a pale red or pale blue color, which became solid red or solid blue, as that state became overwhelmed with Republican or Democratic votes. A few states changed color as the evening went on, but by about 6:30 in the evening, California time, I was sure that Trump would win. One could click on the state to get the details, such as what percentage of votes were in, and by county, and I saw what was happening.
IN THE LARGE POPULATION CITY AREAS and COLLEGE TOWN AREAS the voting was Democratic, but the more rural areas had gone Republican, and the "RUST BELT", the areas where so very many of those descendants of Hungarian and Slavic immigrants had come, worked, and lost their jobs to the export of the work to other countries - including Japan and Mexico- went Republican too. It was city versus country, educated versus not so much, but certainly part of a long held theory of mine that PEOPLE ALWAYS VOTE THEIR JOBS!
Honesty, though I'd been telling everyone I encountered for the last week who wanted to talk the election that I believed Hillary Clinton would win, when I said I thought the race would be very close, many people got mad at me. Everyone thought the whole campaigning process had been disgusting and humiliating for us as a county and wanted it to be over.
Here's the thing. DONALD TRUMP WAS NO MORE A REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE than BERNIE SANDERS WAS A DEMOCRATIC ONE. Both ran with a party because traditionally it is the way to win, yet Trump financed his own campaign with about one hundred million, and for a billionaire that's not so much, while Sanders did surprising well with near no campaign funds but the free labor of grass roots activists. AND BOTH TALKED ABOUT ECONOMIC ISSUES as the BOTTOM LINE PROBLEM HERE IN THE STATES.
I felt vindicated to have written in my candidate when I read this morning that former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara had voted but not at all for President, a none of the above vote.
Remember that it was during President William J. Clinton's office that jobs were sent to Mexico. Some people thought that if Mexicans could make good wages in Mexico there would not be so much illegal immigration from that country. I was against that trade agreement. Remember when President Bush Jr. and other Republican's defended the way big corporations were sending manufacturing jobs overseas, calling it "work Americans won't do?" I knew that was, to put it politely, B.S. I knew that because I met out of work people everywhere who were loosing everything, including their houses and apartments, desperately at the libraries looking for any kind of work, often aged out or in need of retraining, and I remembered the truth of the work that immigrants from Hungary and other Slavic countries generations before.
So when DONALD TRUMP said to make America Great Again he meant that those jobs "Americans won't do" would SO be done by Americans again. That message, that campaign promise, is what got him elected, and it wasn't just against the precedent of the Democratic Clintons but also the Republican Bushs!
The word Campaign before the word Promise often negates the Promise. However, we can't always say that a candidate once in office then lied, because our President is not a Dictator or King, but must deal with the Senate and the House, our system of "checks and balances" in place to prevent the President from being either. Currently the Republicans will dominate the Senate and Supreme Court nominees may also be conservatives and so it is possible that Trump can get more of what he promises actually done with less opposition.
Now we come to his wife MELANIA TRUMP and what her role will be as First Lady. This morning I read Daily Mail UK and saw the headlines from newspapers around the world, in Europe and the Middle East, some in shock, while the leaders of many countries, including Hungary, were at least polite enough to send congratulations, if not having great enthusiasms for DONALD TRUMP as PRESIDENT.
May I suggest that MELANIA TRUMP can be an in the White House representative of the humble people who have immigrated and made good? She grew up in a communist apartment block, now lives in Trump Tower, and will go to the White House. She is intelligent and she speaks several languages, English not being her first language. She appears to have taken on the traditional role of wife and mother, as well as the traditional role of volunteer worker and charity fundraiser, and she is unlikely to be the "power behind the man," but she is as unconventional a first lady as there has ever been, not because of her first generation American status, but because she was a model who got naked, and is the third wife of a man who has children from three marriages, all who got behind him in this campaign. She is more of the modern generation than her husband. Her air of sophistication and presence may be more Jackie Kennedy than Pat Nixon or Lady Bird Johnson or Michelle Obama, but we are all hoping that the once womanizing Trump has left his old ways behind in marriage to her! If there is anyone to tell this man to start thinking about what he has to say instead of spewing and back-stepping, she's the one.
Like many Americans I will both keep an open mind and wait and see what happens. I feel lucky to live in California though!
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Note September 2022.
So much has happened with Trump in office, and of late, the scandal in which he is accused of possessing and using documents that never belonged to him personally and belong in our National Archives.
