Kossack Vetwife’s short story showing us the photo of Melania posing with a gun, standing on the wing of a plane while wearing a revealing thong bikini got an extraordinary 167,929 Facebook shares from Daily Kos alone. It also generated 895 comments.
Vetwife’s story was posted on May 31st. I don’t remember how I just found it, and didn’t notice how old it was when I wrote this. However, I thought it was worth looking into just to see if the image was photoshopped. When I found was interesting enough to write this — generating some comments that it is an inappropriate story. Please don’t jump to conclusions without reading everything.
I didn’t read more than a few, but I did scroll through all of them to see if anybody fact checked this.
from www.snopes.com/...
One commenter found and posted my lead photo, but said they had to be “fake as hell.”
Don’t any of our readers know about Snopes? It was as easy as doing a Google search for Melania, gun, plane, and bikini. Fact-check, Kossacks!
Thankfully the photo from Vetwife’s story is real. They were from the British edition of GQ. You can see several NSFW pictures here.
This is from Snopes: On 22 May 2016 the Facebook page "Proud Liberals" published the above-reproduced image purportedly depicting a bikini-clad Melania Trump (nee Knauss), wife of 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, posing for GQ magazine, set alongside a picture of First Lady Michelle Obama:
Here's Melania Trump with gun, thong & boots. Remember when Republicans complained about Michelle Obama's arms?
The photographic comparison caused a stir, as well as questions as to whether the woman shown on the right was indeed Mrs. Trump. The latter issue was easily resolved, as on 4 March 2016 the British version of GQpublished an item titled "The Future First Lady? See Melania Trump's Nude Photo Shoot." GQ noted that the photo shoot with which the image in question originated antedated Donald Trump's presidential run by 15 years, and the original publication of the photographs took place before Knauss married the current GOP frontrunner:
There’s even more to this: The release of the photos from the nude and nearly nude photo shoot coincided with the comments Trump made about the Khan family. This led to speculation that Trump release them to distract from that controversy.
GQ had a short article about this:
However, we'd have to ask if Trump actually wants distraction from his supposed stupidity. Throughout his election campaign, Trump has constantly stoked up ignorance and fear of Muslims in the US. Trump has consistently sought out headlines that reveal his phobia of Muslims. It's textbook dog whistle politics.
And it's not the first time racy photos of Melania Trump have been released, either. Earlier this year we re-discovered a photo shoot and feature with Melania Knauss from a GQ issue in January 2000. That was certainly no conspiracy.
Trump subsequently used the photos to whip up a controversy about his opponent Ted Cruz. Since then, more than 3 million people have found our story, almost all from Google. There's clearly a huge demand for finding photos of the potential future First Lady in a state of undress. And that's no conspiracy. www.gq-magazine.co.uk/...
from www.gq-magazine.co.uk/…
Who would have thought GQ would figure in a presidential election?
