Are We Really Surprised That President Trump Doesn’t Hold the Door for Melania?

In all of the vigorous analysis of the Trump inauguration (the fashion, the crowd sizes, the resurfacing of 3 Doors Down), one thread of postgame scrutiny is focusing squarely on the Trump marriage: specifically, the host of video footage following the First Couple’s every move over inauguration weekend. This has ignited criticism and conspiracy theories (see: Jezebel’s “Melania Hates Donald: A Theory”) about whether the Trump marriage is lacking in love and respect.

It should be said that this examination is based, largely—and it must be said, unfairly—on reading President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania’s body language, a time-honored tabloid practice in which couples whose knees do not face one another at 45-degree angles while seated, for example, can be disqualified as having a sexless marriage that is hurtling straight for divorce) and hurtling straight for divorce. And, in all fairness, the Obamas’ marriage (a lovefest if there ever was one) is a tough act to follow. But for the Trumps, inauguration weekend only fed critics’ suspicions.

One awkward and much-shared clip showed Melania flashing a wooden smile when Trump turned to face her during one of the inauguration’s benedictions, then quickly dropping her smile into a grimace once he looked away. One showed her and Trump’s kiss on the dais, with a good few inches of space between their cheeks. Yet another highlighted the difference in how President Barack Obama warmly greeted Michelle on the Capitol steps, compared with Trump’s stern acknowledgment of Melania’s arrival.

Still more footage showed the First Couple sitting solemnly at the post-inauguration luncheon and, perhaps most powerfully, President Trump neglecting to hold the car door for Melania or escort her into the White House on inauguration morning.

Again, it’s possible that these close reads of the Trumps’ inauguration behavior are just bad optics on what has to be a stressful day: that they’re just not the kind of couple to canoodle on the Capitol steps under the glare of, um, the entire world. But the real surprise may be that anyone is surprised at all that President Trump might be the type of guy who wouldn’t hold the door for his wife, or so much as walk side by side with her up the White House steps. At the risk of playing tabloid body-language Analyst, of course, Trump would strut self-assuredly into his new family home first, leaving his wife to follow in the dust several paces behind him. Despite his daughter Ivanka’s assurances that he’s a feminist and his claims that “nobody respects women more,” he hasn’t exactly been a model of chivalry nor, more significantly, a man noted for seeing women—namely his wives—as equal partners. (Recall his retrograde comments about leaving the tedious tasks of child-rearing, like diaper-changing, to his wives.)

This is a man who, the same year he married Melania, bragged to Billy Bush about having “moved on” Bush’s colleague Nancy O’Dell “like a bitch” and grabbing women’s genitals as a means of flirtation. He’s also a man who has branded pregnancy a workplace “inconvenience”; criticized the physical appearance of one of the women who accused him of sexual assault; derided his opponent as a “nasty woman” for the sin of formidably debating him; overwhelmingly filled his cabinet with men; and, the day after a historic worldwide women’s protest against his policies, swiftly reinstated the global gag rule, a measure blocking federal funding to any overseas NGO that so much as mentions abortion to its patients, a statute that could endanger women’s health across the world.

Are we really shocked that he didn’t hold the door for his wife? We shouldn’t be.