Let’s talk about Melania Trump.

America’s first lady was last seen in public on May 10. On Friday morning we learned she won’t join the president this weekend at Camp David. Her absence has sparked all manner of wild theorizing, from rumors of plastic surgery to suggestions she moved back to New York City.

But I’m here to tell you it’s far more scandalous than anyone imagined.

After minutes of careful conjuring and professional assumptionizing, I unraveled the truth: The Deep State helped sneak Melania out of the White House through a tunnel and she is now living with Barack and Michelle Obama.

It’s the most shocking, absolutely made up political scandal since Donald Trump proved conclusively that President Barack Obama was not born in America.

I’ll get to the details of my investigation in a moment, but first, let’s make sure everyone understands the Deep State. It’s the insidious network of government workers devoted to bringing down President Trump’s administration. We know it’s real because a bunch of people on television and the president of the United States say it’s real.

We also know the Deep State is behind another very real scandal that Trump has dubbed “SpyGate.” SpyGate — also known as SPYGATE! — involves spies Trump claims were placed inside his campaign in an effort to unfairly link him to all the secret meetings members of his campaign were innocently having with shady Russian figures.

SpyGate is 100 percent real, and we know that because the evidence is so overwhelmingly obvious that regular non-Trump humans aren’t able to see it. It’s a bit like how the president said definitively that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s — our eyes clearly saw that Obama had the bigger crowd, but we were wrong because Trump has superior eyes and is right and we should know better.

OK, now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get back to Melania and the fact that she let the Deep State extract her from the White House via a tunnel built by Eric Trump (did I mention Eric Trump is part of this?) and is now living happily with the Obamas.

This is the timeline of events:

April 21: Melania attends the funeral of former first lady Barbara Bush and is photographed sitting next to Barack and Michelle Obama. Suspiciously, Melania is smiling warmly for the first time in recorded history.

May 7: Melania introduces her anti-bullying campaign: Be Best. It’s a clear shot at her husband, who invented bullying and prides himself on being worst.

May 10: The first lady is last seen in public.

May 14: Melania has kidney surgery at Walter Reed Medical Center. It wasn’t announced publicly until the surgery was over. Few details are given.

May 19: The White House reports that the first lady has returned to the White House, though there’s no explanation for a five-day hospital stay following a surgery many doctors said is often an outpatient procedure.

May 20: A sinkhole is spotted on the North Lawn of the White House.

May 30: As questions mount about the first lady’s whereabouts, a tweet is sent from her Twitter account that reads: “I see the media is working overtime speculating where I am & what I'm doing. Rest assured, I'm here at the @WhiteHouse w my family, feeling great, & working hard on behalf of children & the American people!”

Now let me ask you this: If you’re the Trump administration and you don’t want people to know that the first lady ran off via a tunnel to live with the Obamas — President Trump’s arch-enemies — what would you do? You would write that tweet and send it from the first lady’s Twitter account.

And then you would have the first lady’s communication director draw attention to the tweet and pretend it’s proof that everything is status quo. Sure enough, Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communication director, retweeted the May 30 tweet and wrote: “Straight from @FLOTUS!”

You’re probably wondering how I put together the specifics of Melania’s escape? Simple.

The five-night hospital stay for a minor surgical procedure was clearly a ham-handed story concocted by White House officials trying to cover something up. As the days with no public appearances dragged on, I asked myself: Where would Melania most likely be?

Then I remembered the funeral photo and thought, “She’s happiest when she’s with the Obamas.” (Who can blame her? They’re lovely people.) So that told me where she had gone.

It was also clear her accomplice was the Deep State. It’s to blame for literally everything that goes wrong in the administration.

The trickiest part was figuring out how the first lady made it off the White House grounds unnoticed. The sinkhole was the breakthrough.

We all know Eric Trump is a vampire (Google it), and as such, he must have an underground lair at the White House. That makes him the only person connected to the administration with the subterranean skills to create an escape tunnel. The sinkhole was just a minor tunnel cave-in that happened weeks after Melania fled.

And there you have it: MelaniaGate! As ironclad a conspiracy as any of President Trump’s theories on Russia, inauguration sizes, Obama’s birth certificate, tapped phones in Trump Tower or widespread voter fraud.

The unseeable evidence is all there. You just have to believe.

rhuppke@chicagotribune.com

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