First lady Melania Trump rocked high-heel stilettos on her way to Texas Tuesday, where the president crowed about his crowd size near the flooded city of Houston. And her fashion choice raised some eyebrows on Twitter — good for a few laughs — but who cares. It's Twitter, after all.
To Fox News, though, these critiques were the height of impropriety.
"You'd think the press would have more to worry about than what the first lady wears, but no," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show Tuesday night.
"I am not much of [a] huge feminist or anything . . . and yet here [the press] is judging a woman on her footwear. That sounds like the war on women to me," he added.
A defense of Melania Trump might be fair. Attacking a woman for the way she dresses is usually not appropriate. But it was the network protecting the first lady that made the defense obsolete.
For years, Fox News ran stories about the way former First Lady Michelle Obama looked. On Fox News' website, multiple stories — from "Sacrifice? Michelle Obama wears $1,000 skirt on 'The View'" to "Michelle Obama wears $540 designer sneakers to feed the poor" — criticized Obama's apparel.
For every occasion, Fox News found the need to document how much Obama's dress cost. When the Obamas hosted a dinner for French leader Francois Hollande, Fox News ran a headline that read: "Shocker: Michelle Obama's dinner dress cost more than annual U.S. poverty level."
The Washington Post's Robin Givhan wrote that Trump's attire suggested that she knew her feet would never touch the cold Texas floods, "so why pretend?"
"Well, sometimes pretense is everything," Givhan wrote. "It's the reason for the first lady to go to Texas at all: to symbolize care and concern and camaraderie."
In his stringent defense of Trump, Carlson went so far as to channel Hillary Clinton: "When you criticize one woman, you're criticizing all women."
His guest, radio host Tammy Bruce, agreed. "It's hypocrisy," she said, without a hint of irony.
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