New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd Shreds MELANIA in Brutal Movie Review

(Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

“The riddle of the Slovenian Sphinx has been solved,” begins New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s brutal Sunday review of the first lady’s vanity project, MELANIA, the documentary.

“It turns out there is no riddle, no enigma, no mystery, no dark anguish,” Dowd writes of the $40 million Amazon project with a $35 million marketing budget — adding that the movie shows Melania Trump exactly “where she wants to be, in the bosom of a corrupt family that is prostituting the People’s House.”

Since she claimed she learned nothing new about the first lady from the movie, Dowd delved into other movie-related topics, like the fact that Melania’s personal cut of the $40 million was at least $28 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“This is particularly gross given that Amazon is engaged in mass layoffs and [Jeff] Bezos seems intent on starving his Washington Post of money and talent,” Dowd wrote. “The split screen of Bezos and his spendthrift wife, Lauren Sánchez, frolicking everywhere — including Paris fashion week — while the tech mogul defiles the crown jewel nurtured by Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham, is sickening.”

Scenes from the movie, according to Dowd, include Melania persuading Trump to declare himself a “unifier” in his inaugural address. “She seems oblivious to the fact that his rhetoric and policies are designed to enrage and divide,” Dowd writes.

In another scene, Melania and son, Barron Trump, “do not want to get out of the limo during the inaugural parade,” over fears of “political violence, again without acknowledging that her husband has been provoking violence since he and Melania rode down his golden escalator.”

And in yet another, Melania “has a warm chat about her immigrant roots with a designer who is an immigrant from Laos, ignoring that her husband has torn America apart by denigrating immigrants and unleashing a rabid force of ICE agents on American cities.”

Dowd ends her screed by declaring, “Melania, the movie star, lives up to the message on the infamous jacket she wore to a migrant child detention center: ‘I really don’t care. Do U?’ It turns out she does care — for herself. ”

The opening weekend box office draw for MELANIA came in at just about $7 million, which some critics lambasted as a box office bomb.

Read The New York Times opinion column here.

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