The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

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‘I heard you missed me’: Melania returns to Rose Garden reception and steals the show

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BS BULLETIN:

  • Melania Trump’s Fostering the Future network has now expanded to 26 colleges and universities, with Indiana University and Purdue joining the program after a new $2 million commitment.
  • The first lady revealed the program has already helped produce its first doctor this spring.
  • And after keeping a relatively low public profile, Melania opened with a perfectly Melania line: “I heard you missed me. Here I am.”

First lady Melania Trump returned to center stage at the White House Thursday and managed to accomplish something Washington almost never does anymore: make a major announcement about helping children without turning it into a two-hour political grievance session.

“Good afternoon. I heard you missed me. Here I am,” Melania told the Rose Garden crowd, drawing laughter as she made her first public appearance in roughly a month.

Then she got down to business.

IndyCar and Fox Corporation are contributing $2 million — $1 million each — to fund scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University through Melania’s Fostering the Future initiative. The two schools become the 25th and 26th colleges in a nationwide network designed to help young people coming out of foster care earn degrees, build careers and achieve financial independence.

“Our mission is simple yet transformational: provide every young person from the foster care community the chance to earn a college education, launch a meaningful career, and achieve lasting financial independence,” Melania said.

The growing network now includes schools such as Ohio State, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt, Arizona State, the University of Georgia, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida and others across the country.

And there was a result buried underneath all the headlines about Melania’s red-white-and-blue wardrobe that deserves considerably more attention: Fostering the Future helped educate its first doctor this spring. “He will change the lives of so many people,” the first lady said, before predicting future graduates will “build new companies, launch new industries, and redefine what is possible for all Americans.”

That is what the initiative is supposed to do. Melania launched Fostering the Future in 2021 as part of BE BEST, concentrating on young Americans who can face a brutal transition once they age out of foster care. The broader effort now stretches beyond scholarships into housing assistance, savings and investment accounts, and federal policy aimed at helping foster youth reach adulthood with something more than a government pamphlet and good luck.

Her senior adviser Marc Beckman told Breitbart that Melania has been working behind the scenes to build what he called “pillars” for foster children — education on one side and financial independence on the other. He also said the first lady has personally pressed for legislation making some of those programs permanent.

The Rose Garden event doubled as a kickoff for this weekend’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix, part of America’s 250th birthday celebration. An IndyCar decked out in red, white and blue carried BE BEST and Fostering the Future branding, and every car participating in Sunday’s race is expected to carry a specially designed BE BEST logo.

Melania took one look at the car and offered perhaps the most concise automotive review in White House history: “Gorgeous and powerful.”

Fair enough.

MY QUICK TAKE

“I heard you missed me.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you troll Washington without even raising your voice.

But beneath the clothes, the race cars and the Melania mystique is something the media routinely manages to overlook: there are actual results here.

Twenty-six universities. Scholarships. Housing assistance. Investment accounts. And now the program has produced its first doctor. Imagine the press coverage if Michelle Obama had announced that. We would have a Netflix documentary, three commemorative Time magazine covers and Joy Reid sobbing gently into a microphone about “transformational leadership.”

Melania does it and half the coverage is: Nice skirt.

Her central argument is also refreshingly un-Washington: help these young people become educated, employable and financially independent.

Independent. There’s a word government programs don’t use nearly enough.

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