For an
Africa trip rife with colonial imagery, this somehow feels right.
Melania Trump’s October trip to Africa may never stop being controversial. According to federal spending records, Trump’s hotel bill during her stop in
Cairo cost taxpayers $95,050—even though, as spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham told Quartz, Trump did not even stay overnight at the InterContinental Semiramis hotel and was only in Cairo for six hours.
It’s unclear how the First Lady and her staff racked up the bill at the hotel, where rooms start at $119 and go up to $699 for the presidential suite. But it’s a suitable price tag for a trip that had a distinctly colonialist vibe, from Trump’s pith helmet to the very fact that the First Lady was visiting countries her husband had referred to as “shitholes.” We imagine a Cairo hotel with a presidential suite would find a bit more approval, but Trump likely wasn’t there long enough to find out.
In an hour-long ABC News interview filmed during the Africa trip, Trump insisted that people should be more focused on what she does rather than what she wears, in one of her few statements of actual substance. Does racking up a $95,000 hotel bill for no discernible reason count?