Louise Linton successfully made a career change from middling B-movie actress (she played the town cop in last year’s pointless Cabin Fever remake) to professional rich lady when she married former Goldman Sachs executive and current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin back in June. And she’s embracing her new role, as evidenced not only by this fawning Town And Country feature on her many jewels, but by a controversial Instagram post that saw Linton treating official government business as an opportunity to promote her personal #brand of shamelessness. “Great #daytrip to #Kentucky!,” she wrote after accompanying her husband to a speaking gig on tax reform. Sure. That was followed by a flurry of the type of hashtags generally associated with “influencers” angling for free shit online, like “#hermesscarf,” “#valentinorockstudheels,” and “#valentino.”
Again, pretty normal for Instagram. Where Linton went overboard, according to fauxop-eds in liberal rags from The Washington Post to The New York Times, was in her condescending response to a commenter who wrote, “Glad we could pay for your little getaway. #deplorable.” The general gist of Linton’s response is, “aw, it talks!,” asserting her dominance over “jennimiller29"by stating, “Have you given more to the economy than me or my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes or in self sacrifice to your country? … Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice each year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours.” (If jennimiller29 is in a middle-class tax bracket, then yeah, she probably is sacrificing a larger percentage of her taxes to the government than whatever the IRS manages to pry from Mnuchin’s offshore accounts.) Then comes the kicker: “You’re adorably out of touch,” the woman whose #ootd cost more than the average American worker’s monthly salary said.
“Your kids look very cute. Your life looks cute,” Linton added, her words dripping with the condescension of a boutique salesperson speaking to a customer weighing more than 130 pounds. “Sending me passive aggressive Instagram comments isn’t going to make life feel better.” And indeed, Linton’s life immediately got much worse, almost as bad as the time she had to settle for the 2007 Château Pétrus instead of the 2005. She had to take her Instagram private—private!—after negative media coverage online and on TV. She was even forced to apologize—not personally, of course, but through her publicist, for whom she sacrifices so much. “I apologize for my post on social media yesterday as well as my response. It was inappropriate and highly insensitive,” she said, presumably as a Cambodian child’s tears were individually hand-dropped into her elegant ducts.