The media has churned out its usual morass of copycat stories working the same angle. "It's no big deal" and "Trump is terrible". But that's just the media being the media.
We'll see whether it's a big deal or not after a few years of trips. There were times when Hillary and Laura Bush didn't wear hijabs. But the genuinely shameful times were when they did. It's hard to think of a more obvious projection of weakness.
And President Trump had no interest in projecting weakness.
To understand what a terrible message it is, the hijab dates back in origin to a command to Mohammed that Muslim women distinguish themselves from captured sex slaves to avoid being raped.
The Koranic verse that mandates covering states, “O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies that they may thus be distinguished and not molested” (Koran 33:59)
The context of Koran chapter 33 verse 59 is even grimmer if you put it in the context of verse 50 which allowed Mohammed’s army to enslave and rape captured women and the use of the Burka to distinguish between wives and slaves.
Qadri’s Irfan-ul-Quran translation comments on 33:59 that “It is more likely that this way they may be recognized (as pious, free women), and may not be hurt (considered by mistake as roving slave girls.)”
When Mohammed captured Safiyya bint Huyayy, a Jewish teenager, during his campaign of ethnic cleansing against the region's Jewish population, he told his followers, "Tomorrow if you see her covered with a veil then she is my wife; if you see her without a veil then she is a slave girl."
When American female leaders don the hijab, it's a plea not to be molested by Muslim men. It's a terrible message because it endorses the Islamic entitlement to abuse any woman they capture. And it's an obvious form of submission.