Does Melania Trump have a body double? Apparently, this is a thing that people are concerned about on social media so Monday the ladies of the View devoted a segment to talk about it. After introducing the topic, Joy Behar immediately jumped with both feet saying “That one does not look like her.” She was referring to a photo of Trump and Melania. “I wasn’t going to go along with this but that one in that picture doesn’t look like her,” she added.

Co-host Sunny Hostin then chimed in saying she had spent an hour looking at this and also seemed to think something was off. “Melania is a very tall, statuesque woman and the one that we saw, the first one that we showed, she looks kind of short,” Hostin said.

“I think this is crazy and it’s absurd, but it’s also funny,” Ana Navarro said. She continued, “I’d rather be talking about whether it’s a fake Melania or whether he, the President of the United States, is a Russian asset or not.”

Abby Huntsman wasn’t convinced this was anything more than a time waster. In response to the segment the director of communications for the First Lady tweeted this:

.@flotus & @potus traveled to Alabama to pay their respects & comfort victims of the tornado devastation. In typical fashion, @theview chooses to laugh in the face of tragedy. Shameful. https://t.co/KzG2c4Th4a

— Stephanie Grisham 45 Archived (@StephGrisham45) March 11, 2019

Apparently, this whole thing started back in 2017 a few months after the Melania hand swat became international news. Remember that when Trump came into office in 2017 there was a big push not to “normalize” him. But Melania, as the First Lady, was attractive and seemed destined to be more popular than Trump. People on the left weren’t sure how to handle her. So the running gag became that she hated him too. Anything which fed this narrative, like the hand swat, became big news. And the body double was a kind of variation on the theme. Here’s how Sky News covered it in Oct. 2017:

While some are convinced the woman standing next to Mr Trump was not his wife, others joked it could not be possible because the President would not be able to find another woman prepared to spend time with him.

And that’s still the joke Joy Behar is making now. In fact, that’s the joke everyone is making about this:

The first clue that this is *obviously* a melania body double is that they’re holding hands pic.twitter.com/Jka8IWCujz

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard (@amyharvard_) March 8, 2019

Allowing his wife to send a body double to Alabama because she doesn’t want to go would be the most humane and kind thing President Trump has ever done, which is why I know that has to be the real Melania

— Erin 💋far left loon💋 Ryan (@morninggloria) March 9, 2019

I don’t think anyone really believed this, it was just an amusing idea (to the left) that a) Melania was desperate to get away from Trump and b) it couldn’t be true because no one would agree to take her place. It was just a particularly personal way of expressing disgust for the president and to some degree excusing Melania for marrying him.

At the end of the segment, Abby Huntsman protests the whole topic and Ana Navarro argues it’s not a problem because the show is doing all of it “in jest.” When Huntsman suggests that even in jest spending time on this didn’t make them “better people” Behar replied, “We’re not here to be better people, we’re here to have a good laugh.” I think that about sums up this whole story and the people amused by this. Needless to say, if the right had made a running gag like this about Mrs. Obama hating Barack and promoted it on television as humor, the left would not have been amused.