Be Best has a Trumpian tinge, a view of life as a competition divided into winners and losers. But the grammar crumbles around itself; here is a motto for careerist doges. https://t.co/GgE5vxcR79 pic.twitter.com/sJ9p1syBBB

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 9, 2018

Donald Trump’s emptiness revealed itself over decades in the media glare. But Melania, a former model, has long embraced vacancy as an aesthetic. She has the creepy, objectified opacity of a doll, or a robot—a shimmer of the uncanny valley. Her willed passivity may be the strongest expression of her agency. She is an avatar of blankness, a mute queen. Standing behind a podium in the Rose Garden, her husband in the audience, Melania spoke slowly, with practiced inflections; she sounded like an actor reading from a script that she didn’t quite understand. When the words “Be Best” materialized on a screen above her head, their wobbly font and off-key grammar produced a sense of dissociation, as though we were all kids wondering where our parents had gone.