WASHINGTON — She's our own Melania Antoinette, a high-fashion queen living under something like palace arrest.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, got kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in a woman-to-woman conversation in Lexington, Virginia, a long country drive away. She probably thought she was safe from the front.

Women in Washington are defining the story at the end of the day, and it's getting more interesting than business as usual. With a cabinet secretary, Kirstjen Nielson, and a congresswoman, Maxine Waters, D-Calif., also caught in the partisan fray, scenes are getting more fraught and personal.

Washington is intensifying, but the heat's not just any summer in the city. It feels like civil war battle lines are being redrawn, deep into Trump time.

There's a certain "je ne sais quoi" about Melania Trump and Marie Antoinette. Living in extreme privilege, the French queen and the American first lady, still have something to pout about. These women are clueless about the common touch.

Pray, how does Trump's jacket message, "I Don't Really Care, Do U?" compare to Antoinette's snobbish, "Let them eat cake!" Even with cultural changes since 1789, they ring remarkably alike.

Trump is a native of Slovenia, and Antoinette grew up speaking German in Vienna: Is that any excuse for such baffling, tone-deaf messages? I don't think so.

The French Revolution led the real Marie Antoinette to her death by guillotine in the streets of Paris. She suffered the popular fury at (her husband) the king's misdeeds. We're not that way, but maybe Melania Trump can take up another role model. Perhaps Abigail Adams.

When the first lady made a solo trip to the Southern border to see conditions for immigrants detained there, she visited a center for migrant children. At first it seemed a capital idea, striking out to show concern for how the president's cruel policy of separating families was working out under the Texas sun.

The jacket bombed all that away. Mixed messages aren't in right now.

Sanders was cut to the bone at the Red Hen, but took it well when asked to leave. She, her husband and six friends had their cheese boards before the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, took a stand for nonviolent resistance.

In a civil conversation, the farm-to-table restaurant owner spoke privately to ask the press secretary to leave on grounds of honesty, humanity and compassion. It was the end of a rough week, when America awakened to the fact that 2,000 immigrant children were forcibly separated from their parents by the Trump administration.

"This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals," Wilkinson said. That statement speaks to the shattered condition of the body politic this June — reflecting the divided House perfectly.

Her words landed like a shimmer of light at the end of a very dark spell.

Wilkinson had every right to do what she did, with good grace on both sides. It was textbook civil dissent in a rural part of the public square, but traveled far and spoke worlds. Wilkinson acted as the Quakers acted in the slave era: They sheltered escaping slaves in houses along the way to freedom, with slave catchers on their trail.

We should all look to her simple, clear example for ways to resist Trump's presidency, during which he has even hurt ties to other Western democracies. The Supreme Court just upheld his Muslim travel ban.

Nielson, the cold Homeland Security chief, had her Mexican dinner disrupted. Cry me a river. She enforces the separation policy, with cages, crossing borders of decency. Nonviolent resistance is no picnic, as suffragettes showed Woodrow Wilson. And Martin Luther King Jr. preached and practiced nonviolent resistance on the winning march to civil rights.

Trump warned "Max," as he rudely addressed Waters, not to engage in or encourage resistance. Well, the black California congresswoman knows about making minority voices heard. She won't stop now.

Women here have an underground theory. We wonder if Melania Trump was spelling "passive-aggressive." Perhaps the trip was her peaceful rebellion, with global writing on the White House wall. Her cry for help.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit creators.com.