Melania Trump’s hurricane stilettos are one of her rare, uh, missteps as First Lady

Aug. 30--For a White House that's been dogged by regular blunders on such PR matters as "message" and "optics," First Lady Melania Trump has proven to be one of the few bright spots.

Unlike her husband, President Donald Trump, she doesn't tweet haphazardly or go off teleprompter to say or do things that alienate much of America, and she doesn't upend his staff's frantic efforts at damage control. Unlike her stepdaughter, Ivanka Trump, Melania doesn't post perky self-promotional photos and statements on social media that often come across as tone-deaf or disastrously timed.

Sure, Melania Trump had rough times on the campaign trail, perhaps unwittingly plagiarizing Michelle Obama's convention speech or announcing she'd take on a crusade against cyber-bullying as First Lady -- when her husband is regarded as one of the world's biggest cyber-bullies.

She also faced criticism for taking several months to move to the White House and to adopt an active role as First Lady.

But since then, she has done pretty well on social media, in her public appearances and in accompanying her husband on foreign visits to the Middle East and Europe. In public, she may not always seem totally at ease. Still, she comes off as gracious, humble, friendly and diplomatic.

That is, until Tuesday -- when she stepped out of the White House to board Marine One to travel to Texas and survey catastrophic damage brought by Hurricane Harvey.

Melania walked to Marine One wearing a pair of towering, pointy-toed stilettos that looked better suited "to a shopping afternoon on Madison Avenue or a girls' luncheon at La Grenouille, Vogue said.

The shoes are a challenge enough to wear on dry land, Vogue said, but Melania was headed to an area where thousands of Texans had lost their possessions or homes, and were seen wading through chest-high water to save their lives and what little they had left.

The White House decried the media for paying so much attention to what Melania was wearing on her feet when leaving the White House.

A spokesperson insisted that she had other shoes to change into on the plane. Indeed, when she and the president arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas, she walked off the plane in a more sensible pair of white tennis shoes. She was also wearing a FLOTUS hat.

Still, the optics of Melania's stiletto heels have been burned into the public's memory. Twitter exploded with mockery and outrage, with comedians cracking jokes and pundits and regular people saying that Melania's stiletto-accessorized ensemble could make a great Halloween costume or, much worse, that it showed how she was "out of touch" with the sufferings of people in a hurricane zone.

To be fair, the choice of stilettos marked the first serious fashion misstep of the wife of the self-described billionaire since late May when she arrived at a G7 summit event in Italy, wearing a floral Dolce and Gabbana coat that reportedly retailed for $51,000.

More than a few commentators, including me, pointed out that $51,000 is the equivalent of an average American's household income.

Somehow, the Dolce and Gabbana coat didn't bruise Melania too much with accusations of elitism and being unconcerned with the economic struggles with regular Americans. She got something of a pass because she was at a glamorous event with the spouses of other world leaders and she seemed to be paying homage to the one of the host country's most famous cultural exports: beautiful fashion.

Time and rapidly unfolding events will tell if Melania can, uh, weather her sartorial misjudgment over Hurricane Harvey -- or if it will stick with her and her husband's presidency like the infamous image of President George W. Bush surveying the damage of Hurricane Katrina from Air Force One.

Vogue seemed to be saying that this was Melania's George W. Bush moment, asking: "What kind of message does a fly-in visit from a First Lady in sky-high stilettos send to those suffering the enormous hardship, the devastation of this natural disaster?"

Certainly, her husband is eager for his federal government to not repeat its mistakes with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when Bush and top emergency officials came across as ill-prepared, insensitive and removed from the on-the-ground suffering of people in New Orleans.

But if Trump's White House can look like it is on top of its response to people in Texas, then Melania's hurricane stilettos won't emerge as a symbol of elitism or anything else, but just as a footnote in the coverage of this disaster, if even that.

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