A reporter at the Chicago Tribune says that First Lady Melania Trump isn’t doing her “job” in a column the newspaper published this week.

Dahleen Glanton wrote:

It’s time for Melania Trump to man up. All this taking separate motorcades and hiding out at Mar-a-Lago — at taxpayers’ expense — has gotten old. Each day President Donald Trump’s alleged cheating saga goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel sorry for his wife. We have bigger problems in America than Melania Trump’s humiliation. The first lady needs to step up and start doing her job. That’s right. Her job.

Glanton also said in her column that because Trump is married to the president, she “campaigned hard” for the job she is not doing.

“The first lady would rather we close our eyes and give her a pass,” Glanton wrote. “She’d rather we allow her to ‘focus on being a mom,’ stepping out only for special occasions like Easter in a designer outfit to deliver baskets to sick children.”

“After more than a year watching her drift near the steps of one of the greatest platforms in the world, we still don’t know exactly what Melania Trump stands for,” Glanton wrote. “She has been so preoccupied shielding herself from her husband’s misdeeds that she has been unable to project her own identity.”

“We do have the right to know whether she is still committed to her job,” Glanton concluded, adding that the public should give Trump a “loud wake-up call.”

“She’s been sleeping on the job way too long,” Glanton wrote.

As a woman who was thrust into the political world when her husband decided to run for president, Trump has not yet come forward with a formal platform as is the traditional course for first ladies.

But in the 14 months since Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States, Melania Trump has spoken often about her commitment to helping women, families, and children and has a list of accomplishments to that end, as Breitbart News has reported.

In March 2017, Trump handed out awards at the annual International Women of Courage ceremony at the U.S. Department of State where she was introduced as a campaigner for the safety and security of women and girls around the world.

“The era of allowing brutality against women and children is over,” Trump said to the large crowd of guests gathered to honor 13 women who faced horrific challenges in their lives but persisted to become activists to help others facing a similar plight.

“Each one of these heroic women has an extraordinary story of courage, which should inspire each of us to achieve more than we had ever imagined possible,” Trump said before handing out statuettes and posing for pictures with each of the women.

“Their lives remind us of the boundless capacity of the human spirit when guided by moral clarity and desire to do good,” Trump said.

Trump also presented the 2018 courage awards last month at the State Department.

“Courage is the quality most needed in this world, yet it is often the hardest to find,” Trump said. “Courage sets apart those who believe in a higher calling and those who act on it. It takes courage not only to see wrong but strive to right it. Courage is what sets apart the heroes from the rest; it is equal part bravery and nobility. The women of courage we honor here today are heroes.”

In May 2017, Trump visited a children’s hospital in Rome where she met a young boy who had been waiting for a donor to be found for a heart transplant, and the first lady released a statement after she later heard good news about his fate.

“Upon landing in Belgium, I learned a young boy and his family who had been waiting for a heart transplant was informed that the hospital has found a donor,” Melania said in a statement. “I read a book and held hands with this special little one just a few hours ago, and now my own heart is filled with joy over this news.”

In September 2017, Trump spoke at the United Nations:

“When we join together as parents caring for children, whether they live in our own families, across the street, across the nation, or across the globe, we claim our responsibility to the next generation to ensure they are prepared to accept the torch of leadership for the world of tomorrow,” the first lady said during her speech. “We must teach each child the values of empathy and communication,” she also said, adding that children “are the core of kindness, mindfulness, integrity, and leadership.”

In October 2017, Trump traveled to Huntington, West Virginia, to visit a drug treatment center specializing in helping infants suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome after being exposed to opioids while in their mother’s womb.

Trump visited Lily’s Place, a non-profit drug treatment center for these infants.

“The statistic that 40 percent of babies born addicted to drugs are put into foster care is one that Mrs. Trump would like to see lowered, and Lily’s Place was created with that in mind,” Stephanie Grisham, spokeswoman for the first lady, said in an interview with CNN.

Last month, Trump met with representatives from tech giants in the United States about cyberbullying.

The Washington Post first reported that Trump has invited “Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Snap” as part of her “ongoing effort to have conversations about issues affecting children, including how they handle social media,” Grisham told CNN.

And just ahead of Monday’s Easter Egg Roll at the White House, Melania Trump decided to put American students in the spotlight by asking one from each state to design an egg for the event rather than the professional designers that have traditionally contributed the eggs.

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