THE LONGER Melania Trump has been in Washington, the more she has embraced her role as first lady. Says a longtime friend of both Trumps, “She loves Washington for her son, she loves the school where Barron goes, he’s excelled at sports there and has made friends. When he’s happy, she’s happy.” Melania visibly brightens when talking about her son and when talking about children in general. I have seen it many times, as have others who follow or cover her. She consistently visits children’s hospitals and has made it an annual tradition to spend Valentine’s Day at the Children’s Inn, a residential home for children being treated for rare or complex diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., she befriended a girl undergoing care for leukemia, Caoilinn McLane. “She took the time to listen and made me feel important,” said McLane, in an interview. Since she met Melania three years ago at the hospital when she was fifteen, she has seen the first lady two more times and also talked to her on the phone. McLane was in an ambulance when a cell phone rang, and she was told the first lady wanted to talk to her. “She was very generous with her time and seems very genuine—and relatable. I told her I play soccer and she said her son plays soccer, too.” McLane joined Melania for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the hospital’s rooftop Bunny Mellon Healing Garden, dedicated to U.S. first ladies and designed to be used by patients and their families. McLane said Melania sat on the ledge and helped young patients plant some seeds in the garden. Melania seems most at ease and happy when she is with children, and she is often photographed sitting in a small chair at a low table with youngsters.
Parents and children at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, the private school that Barron attends in suburban Washington, have seen Melania at the school, but say Donald Trump has stayed away. Melania has spoken to other parents at St. Andrew’s about the teen vaping epidemic and has heard from them about how common it is to open a middle schooler’s backpack and find nicotine pods. They have told her that they appreciated that she spoke up and used her influence to help convince her husband to ban fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, which are particularly attractive to kids.
When Barron arrived in Washington, he joined a soccer league affiliated with the local professional soccer team, D.C. United, and Melania would go to watch him play. After her presence was noted on the sidelines, she was seen at least once watching the game at a distance from inside a Secret Service car with tinted windows. Mindful of how disruptive his family’s presence can be, Barron has told other kids that he does not want his father to come to games or to his school because it causes such a commotion. Melania arranged for a soccer coach to kick the ball around the White House grounds with Barron and installed a soccer net outside the Oval Office.
Even before Barron officially moved into the White House, for his first Easter Egg Roll, Melania invited D.C. United players and their children and set up goals on the White House lawn. Patrick Mullins and Marcelo Sarvas talked to Barron and gave him a signed soccer ball. Sarvas brought his son, who kicked the ball around with Barron. Mullins told the Washington Post that Barron had a passion for the game and knew a lot about the sport. “He was very knowledgeable about soccer, knew about D.C. United and was interested to know more.”
Since then, Barron has added to his soccer ball collection, even receiving a World Cup final ball from Vladimir Putin. Putin handed it to Donald Trump at a joint press conference in Helsinki in 2018, prompting Trump to say that he would give it to Barron; he then tossed it to Melania, who was sitting near the podium. She missed it, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo caught the ball and handed it to her. The gift didn’t arrive politics-free. Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, tweeted, “If it were me, I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”
Like many kids his age, Barron plays video games and likes to compete with other kids playing popular online games. He also invites friends to the White House. Barron occasionally appears in the news, primarily in photos taken on the White House grounds when he is walking to a helicopter or arriving at Mar-a-Lago in Air Force One. In early 2020, Barron caused a stir: at age thirteen, he towered over both his parents—the Daily Mail had already cheekily headlined a photo of Barron “Trump Tower.” In Slovenia, people were chatting about whether he could soon be taller than Luka Dončić, the hugely popular Slovenian-born Dallas Mavericks basketball star, who is six foot seven. (Dončić is featured far more than Melania in the Slovenian news.)
Barron’s grandparents are central to his life as well as Melania’s. Amalija is a constant support. Winston Wolkoff, who has seen Melania with her mother, said of Amalija: “She is her left hand and her right hand, and she enables her to be who she is.”
In recent years, Melania has helped her mother through a serious illness, making sure she received the best care. Melania has also faced her own health issues while in the White House; she has a kidney condition that required surgery, and over the years also suffered from painful kidney stones. In 2018, she was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and according to her office, “underwent an embolization procedure to treat a benign kidney condition,” with no further details except to say the procedure was successful and there were no complications. One person who has observed Melania with her mother said, “It’s more like they’re sisters than they’re mother and daughter.” While Trump has called Melania his “rock,” those close to the family say Melania’s rock is her mother.
The grandparents have taught Barron songs in Slovenian. Friends of Viktor’s recalled him sitting in a café in Sevnica in early 2018, happy to be home and among a group of men he has known for decades, when his phone rang. It was Barron, calling from the White House and wanting to tell his grandfather about his day. “Viktor was so proud. He put him on speakerphone. Barron spoke 100 percent Slovenian!” said one man who listened in. I met with several of Viktor’s friends a few months after that phone call, and they said that Viktor had told them not to talk publicly, so they did not want to give their names. But they were proud, too, of this boy who liked Slovenian food and knew the language and was so close to his grandparents. The men said that Viktor loves to talk about Barron but mostly avoids talk of his son-in-law. Viktor does not agree with Trump’s “anti-immigration talk,” his friends said. On his trips back to his hometown, Viktor walks a couple miles a day along the Sava River, enjoying the far simpler life.
One family member who has not been visible in the White House or at events, and who was not seen publicly during the inauguration, is Melania’s sister, Ines. Ines Knauss (she also changed Knavs to Knauss) has an apartment a couple blocks from Trump Tower. Very little is known about how she spends her time, and it is difficult to find any recent pictures of Melania and her sister together. As of early 2020, she had received her green card, or permanent U.S. residence status, according to immigration attorney Michael Wildes. Those who know her describe her as creative. She has posted on her social media accounts lovely old pictures of growing up in Slovenia. She noted that Stane Jerko, the photographer who took famous pictures of Melania, also took photos of her when she was a teenager for a Jutranka catalog.
Periodically Ines has made puzzling or unexpected comments in response to things said about her famous sister. Just after the 2016 election, a childhood friend of Melania’s was quoted as saying nice things about Melania and recalling that as teenagers they listened to Duran Duran and Queen and drank “Coca-Cola by taking really small sips, as it was considered a rare luxury.” Ines tweeted: “What kind of nonsense is that—talking about Coca Cola.” There have been news reports that Ines offers her sister style advice. In 2018, the New York Post wrote that “once or twice a month, the first lady quietly comes to New York, and has her sister come over to give advice as she tries on outfits.” It was unclear why Melania felt the need to address that, but her spokeswoman responded, “Mrs. Trump and her sister are very close, but she is not who helps her with styling her wardrobe. At the end of the day, it is Mrs. Trump who decides what she will wear.”
Perhaps it was inevitable, with all the focus on Melania’s clothes, that her most memorable misstep as first lady involved one of her fashion choices. In June 2018, she appeared to publicly split with her husband over the administration’s policy of separating families and children at the U.S.-Mexico border. When images of the conditions first appeared, the Washington Post published a devastating op-ed by former first lady Laura Bush, who broke her usual silence on policy matters and wrote that “this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” adding, “These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” Through a spokesperson, Melania weighed in with her own criticism: “Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” Stephanie Grisham told CNN. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.” Within a day, all first ladies had called for an end to family separation, including Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Rosalynn Carter. Inside the White House, Ivanka was making it clear that she, too, opposed the policy. To some it appeared that both Ivanka and Melania were angling to get public credit for getting the policy changed.
In a later interview with ABC News, Melania addressed the border issue directly. “It was unacceptable for me to see children and parents separated. It was heartbreaking. And I reacted with my own voice,” she said. “Yes [I disagree], and I let him know. I didn’t know that that policy would come out. I was blindsided by it. I told him at home, and I said to him that I feel that’s unacceptable, and he felt the same.” Days after Melania’s public rebuke, the president issued an executive order ending the “zero tolerance” policy that had separated more than four thousand children from their parents or guardians. Trump explained his decision: “Ivanka feels very strongly. My wife feels very strongly about it.” Melania had told him it was terrible, for the children, for the country, for him, and that she wanted to go to the border.
But while Melania’s repudiation of the child separation policy is often seen as her standing up to her husband, some inside the White House say her response was coordinated with her husband, who realized that he had made a mistake and was happy for Melania to help him fix it. The criticism generated by the TV images from the border had upset him. Even his Republican Party allies labeled the situation unacceptable. Trump blamed his aides for not realizing the damage. He had wanted to project strength at the border, but instead he had created a a humanitarian crisis and a public mess.
Melania made an unannounced trip to McAllen, Texas, and toured a shelter for migrant children, some of whom had been separated from their parents. Her visit, coming the day after Trump made a rare reversal of policy and signed the executive order, was a way to project a softer side of the administration, and Trump wanted Melania—not his critics—to receive credit for it. It was good cop, bad cop, Trump-style.
Then came the jacket. As she boarded the government jet at Andrews Air Force Base, on her way to Texas, photographers took note of her olive green $39 Zara jacket, with big white graffiti-style letters on the back that read “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” Melania did not wear the coat while she toured the facility on the border, but she did wear it again on her return to Maryland. The choice seemed deliberate: It was eighty degrees and humid, and the jacket had been a topic of controversy for hours.
What was the first lady trying to say? She clearly cared about the children—she was going to visit them. But curiosity was quickly overtaken by outrage on social media. Stephanie Grisham said that it was just a jacket, with “no hidden message.” But both Trumps would later say that it actually did have a message. First, Donald Trump tweeted: “ ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’ written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!” A few months later, Melania offered her own explanation: “It’s obvious I didn’t wear that jacket for the children… It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. I want to show them that I don’t care. You could criticize whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what feels right.” Melania’s real message with the jacket appears to have been more broadly directed at many of her critics, not just the media. Several people in the White House said that also included Ivanka.
Melania’s first—and, so far, only—solo trip abroad also generated controversy. The trip, in October 2018, brought her to Ghana, Malawi, Kenya, and Egypt. Near the end of the trip, she stood before the Great Sphinx in Giza, Egypt. Her skinny black necktie was blown over her shoulder by the hot desert breeze, and a white fedora with a black band shielded her eyes from the heavy sun. Her snow-white Chanel blouse was buttoned to the top, and she had draped a sand-colored Ralph Lauren jacket over her shoulders. She used one of the world’s greatest historical landmarks as the dramatic background for what looked like a fashion photo shoot.
Melania then stood before reporters and answered questions, a rarity from a first lady who has been so sparing with her public statements. A reporter started to ask about the white pith helmet that she wore on safari in Kenya, which for many on the African continent symbolizes a brutal and painful colonial past. Melania responded with a faint puff of irritation: “I wish people would focus on what I do, not what I wear.” To many in the press pool, the reply, coming from a longtime model, seemed like LeBron James complaining about people asking him about basketball.
Melania crisscrossed Africa. She bottle-fed baby elephants in Kenya and visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, where Africans were held captive in dungeons before they were shipped in chains abroad. She seemed most relaxed and natural visiting with children at orphanages, hospitals, and schools. She exuded an easy warmth as she read with them, embraced them, and spoke with the people caring for them, becoming Melania, the Mom-in-Chief. “Thank you for educating them to be best,” she told staff at a school in Malawi, “and to grow up into educated adults for generations to come.” Like other first ladies before her, especially Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, she charmed Africans at every stop.
“Many Ghanaians are saying that she is the nicer of the Trumps,” Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, an opposition party leader in Ghana’s parliament, told the Washington Post. “Melania is an immigrant, too. She is from a humble background… There’s a soft spot. She can become an ally, she can give her husband fresher perspectives about Africa. We need someone to tell him now that Africa is not a basket case as he thinks.” Throughout the trip, Melania highlighted programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and she was accompanied on the trip by USAID administrator Mark Green. In Ghana, Melania visited a hospital that received USAID funding for programs to help mothers and newborns. She visited a school in Malawi that relied on USAID funding for literacy programs, and she donated 1.4 million books to that effort. “I wanted to be here to see the successful programs that the United States is providing the children,” she said at the Malawi school. Before she departed for her trip, she had remarked at the UN General Assembly, “I am so proud of the work this Administration is doing through USAID.”
What made Melania’s focus on USAID particularly noteworthy was that her husband’s administration was seeking to cut USAID’s funding to Africa by up to 30 percent. (When Laura Bush made a solo visit to South Africa, Tanzania, and Rwanda in 2005, it came at a time when her husband was working to double U.S. aid to Africa. And he had made addressing Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic a cornerstone of his administration.) Critics pointed out that such deep cuts would devastate development and health programs, especially initiatives to treat and prevent AIDS and malaria. Congress ultimately rejected the Trump administration cuts and restored the aid. In Egypt, Melania skated right past a question about her husband’s funding cuts. She said that the message of her trip was “that we care, and we want to show the world that we care.”
The Africa trip continued to make headlines a month later and would play a prominent role in a high-profile firing inside the White House. On November 13, 2018, a Tuesday afternoon, Melania’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham issued a statement about Mira Ricardel, the deputy national security adviser and one of the highest-ranking women in the White House: “It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.” First ladies, including Melania, have privately urged their husbands to fire people, but no historian could recall one publicly calling for the ouster of a top West Wing official. Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University who studies first ladies, said it was a moment that made people realize that Melania is not “just the striking-looking former international model standing silently next to her husband.”
Ricardel, then fifty-eight, had a top security clearance. Her portfolio included North Korean sanctions and protecting U.S. elections from foreign, specifically Russian, interference. Ricardel’s father had emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1954 and she was very familiar with the part of the world where Melania grew up. A Washington veteran who had worked in George W. Bush’s Department of Defense, Ricardel had a long career in international affairs and was not reluctant to assert herself. A former White House official who attended sensitive briefings alongside Ricardel in the Situation Room, said, “Mira knew more than anyone in the room and had an opinion.” Ricardel felt that the Trump administration at times handed out credentials like candy to policy rookies more interested in taking a selfie in the Oval Office than in serving their country.
The conflict between Ricardel and Melania’s staff dated back to an advance planning visit to Africa. During that trip, the team overnighted on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and according to five people familiar with the trip, at least one of the first lady’s staffers got publicly drunk. Word had passed from Secret Service agents to others in the White House that at least one young staffer was so inebriated that she climbed up on the bar and, according to some accounts, performed a somersault. Excessive drinking on overseas advance trips is not new, and the Secret Service was an agency already familiar with its own alcohol-fueled scandals overseas during the Obama administration.
Ricardel weighed in and told people that Cyprus, located near Syria and Lebanon, was a particularly bad place for U.S. officials to get hammered. As word traveled through the White House, some thought that Ricardel was making too much of the event. She and her Africa experts also irritated members of the first lady’s staff. They viewed her as condescending, and they did not appreciate her letting it be known that she thought they should focus less on photo ops for Melania in Africa and more on U.S. foreign policy objectives. Ricardel was worried about the trip and felt it should be used to reassure African leaders upset at Trump’s “shithole countries” remark about African nations. “These are not sightseeing trips,” Ricardel said. The personality clashes continued, and members of the first lady’s staff increasingly saw Ricardel as a problem.
Ricardel’s team felt that Melania’s staff didn’t understand the importance of certain gestures in the host countries. For example, Grisham had tried to cancel an airport welcoming ceremony with Ghana’s first lady, proposing instead a brief greeting on the tarmac.
Right before the trip, the growing animosity between Melania’s staff and Ricardel and her national security team resulted in a spat over the seemingly small issue of a seat on the first lady’s plane. Reynolds emailed Ricardel that an Africa expert from Ricardel’s team no longer could travel with the first lady. Although the White House later told the media that this decision was made to create more space for security personnel and reporters, Reynolds’s email made no mention of the press. “The needs of the Office of the First Lady, the US Secret Service and White House Military Office are greater than anticipated,” Reynolds wrote. She added that the National Security Council Africa expert was welcome to join at any of the stops, but that she would have to find her own commercial flights. Ricardel knew that made no sense: matching the first lady’s itinerary would be all but impossible and she could send someone to only one stop. Some national security staffers said that perhaps if the country expert from Ricardel’s team had gotten a seat, the controversial pith helmet would have remained in the first lady’s luggage.
With Melania back home in Washington, Ricardel thought that the issues had blown over. But then Stephanie Grisham issued the stinging statement about Ricardel. It led the news. The White House spin at the time was that Melania did not like it when other people bullied her staff and had made a dramatic move. While this may have been true, there was much more to the story.
Melania and Ricardel had never met. Ricardel was stunned by the “she no longer deserves the honor of working in the White House” statement. She called her boss, national security adviser John Bolton, waking him up at 2:00 a.m. He was in Singapore and outraged that his number two had been summarily dismissed: “They can’t do that. You work for me.” As Ricardel watched her face appear on TV screens in her office, she asked to see the president, but when she entered the Oval Office, Grisham and Reynolds from Melania’s staff, and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, were waiting. Ricardel took the empty seat between Grisham and Reynolds in front of the president’s desk. “It’s terrible,” Trump said about the statement, and acted as though it had caught him off guard. Ricardel requested that the statement be withdrawn, saying, “It’s not just humiliating to me. It’s going to make the White House look bad, the First Lady look bad, the presidency look bad.” Trump shook his head, repeating, “This is terrible.”
During the meeting, Grisham went on the offensive and accused Ricardel of leaking to the media, a mortal sin in Trump’s eyes. Ricardel defended herself, telling Trump that she did not talk to the press. Reynolds then accused Ricardel of having “investigated” Melania’s staff. Ricardel said that she had only raised justifiable concern about unprofessional behavior overseas on the advance trip. As the back-and-forth played out in front of Trump, he turned to Grisham and asked, “Who told you to do this?”
“I was told,” she replied, an oddly vague answer.
In the end, Ricardel was forced out.
Melania has not spoken publicly about the firing, but in interviews, multiple White House officials have indicated that, at least in part, West Wing presidential staff used the first lady’s influence to push their own agenda. Three officials said that John Kelly wanted to remove Ricardel, and they said his fingerprints were all over her ouster. “John Kelly orchestrated the whole thing,” one said. He had never liked “that awful woman,” as he called her when she started to clash with Defense Secretary James Mattis. The fact that she was also Bolton’s deputy was another strike against her, in Kelly’s eyes. Hours before the bombshell statement, Zach Fuentes, Kelly’s deputy, had stopped by Ricardel’s office to say that the first lady was upset about press coverage of her Africa trip. Others noted that Kelly’s first attempt to get Ricardel fired had failed, and that his Plan B was to enlist Melania’s team, because, as a White House official said, “He knew Grisham and Lindsay were killers if anyone crossed Melania.”
Several West Wing staffers also said that Trump knew in advance about Melania’s statement on Ricardel, but that after a string of high-profile firings, including of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he didn’t want more discussion of rapid turnover. He also had plans to remove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and especially didn’t want to be seen firing another of the few top women in the administration. It was easier if Melania did it. “I thought it was outrageous Mira was treated that way,” John Bolton wrote in an email to me in 2020. “She behaved throughout with dignity and professionalism and it was a big loss to the Trump administration and to our national security.” How much Melania was told about all the guns out for Ricardel before she signed off on axing her is unclear. But that unprecedented firing illustrates key things about the Trump White House: top administration officials sometimes try to use Melania’s power for their own agenda, and Melania is not afraid of owning a bold move even in the West Wing. And sometimes when it appears Melania is acting independently from her husband, she is actually working with him.
Trump often consults Melania on personnel matters, and she is not shy about sharing her views. When it comes to decisions in the White House, a Trump confidant says, “My guess is that she wins more than she loses.”
MELANIA INCREASINGLY made her voice heard in 2019. On September 9, she spoke out about one of the biggest health concerns in the country, using her official Twitter account to take a pointed position against vaping: “I am deeply concerned about the growing epidemic of e-cigarette use in our children. We need to do all we can to protect the public from tobacco-related disease and death, and prevent e-cigarettes from becoming an on-ramp to nicotine addiction for a generation of youth.” Her tweet tagged the Department of Health and Human Services. It was the first public expression of a campaign that Melania had quietly been waging behind the scenes for weeks as she urged her husband to respond to the nationwide spread of a mysterious vaping-related illness that had already caused multiple hospitalizations and dozens of deaths. The vaping issue was also personal to Melania, the mother of a teenager. At Barron’s school, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, she knew that many parents were worried about the sudden rise in “juuling,” a term derived from a brand of e-cigarette that resembles a small computer flash drive.
While one of Melania’s first big career breaks came as a model in an advertising campaign for Camel cigarettes, she was not a smoker. Aides said that she viewed the issue as one of child safety, which dovetailed well with her Be Best campaign. Two days later, Trump announced, to the surprise of many fellow Republicans, that his administration would pull certain e-cigarettes, whose flavors had names such as “grape slushie” and “strawberry cotton candy,” from the market. The next month, Melania hosted a listening session at the White House where nine teens from across the country shared stories of vape-related panic attacks, chest pain, and even stints in e-cigarette rehab. Melania was engaged, asking questions about how the teens acquired their e-cigarettes and praising retailers for halting sales of the product.
But ultimately, Melania’s influence did not entirely hold sway. The powerful tobacco lobby mounted a counterpush, and Trump backed away from signing the decision memo, which would have ordered candy, fruit, and mint e-cigarette flavors off the market within thirty days. “He didn’t know much about the issue and was just doing it for Melania and Ivanka,” one senior official told the Washington Post in November. By January 2, 2020, his administration ultimately settled on a ban on single-use cartridges with fruit flavors, but not on menthol or tobacco pods or flavored nicotine in “open tank” systems sold in vape shops.
When it comes to her own child, Melania is known at the White House as “The Protector” because of how much effort she devotes to Barron, especially to keep him separated from the intense political fray.
On December 4, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in a high-profile televised hearing in the impeachment proceedings against Trump, Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford University constitutional law professor, mentioned Barron’s name. “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron,” she said. Karlan was trying to make a joke, but shortly after she apologized to the committee: “It was wrong of me to do that. I wish the president would apologize, obviously, for the things that he’s done that’s wrong, but I do regret having said that.”
Trump’s campaign and his allies called Karlan’s words “mean” and “disgusting.” Melania tweeted to her millions of followers: “A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it.” With one tough tweet, Melania had defended her child and helped her husband change the subject from impeachment. But the first lady had a different response a week later when her husband took to Twitter to dismiss passionate climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who at age sixteen had been selected by Time magazine as its Person of the Year. “So ridiculous,” Trump wrote on December 12. “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
Many commentators criticized the president’s decision to pick on a teenager, who has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. And when Melania supported him, she took heat, too.When others asked how she could weigh in on what Karlan had said about Barron but ignore what her husband had said about Greta Thunberg, Melania’s office issued a statement: “Be Best is the First Lady’s initiative, and she will continue to use it to do all she can to help children. It is no secret that the President and First Lady often communicate differently—as most married couples do. Their son is not an activist who travels the globe giving speeches. He is a 13-year-old who wants and deserves privacy.”
ONE REASON why Melania’s influence is not well known is that she avoids the West Wing, where her every move would be visible. She appears only for ceremonial events, preferring to offer Trump advice in private, when it is just the two of them. In late 2017, Melania told her husband that he should be more concerned about the investigation being led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. A former FBI director, Mueller was looking into allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Moscow. She also said that she didn’t believe his legal team was doing enough to protect him, according to a person who was present when she expressed her views. Trump at the time paid less attention. Later, he would say she was right. Months after Melania had warned him about his attorneys, he also reshuffled his legal team.
Though her presence is often unseen, Melania has been at his side at key public moments. In November 2018, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina, Melania and Trump held an extraordinary fifteen-minute meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin was accompanied by a translator, but, in a highly unusual move, there was no one with Trump besides Melania, not even a notetaker or translator.
In the White House, Melania has joined Trump in meetings with candidates for key jobs. When Chris Christie was summoned to meet with Trump in December 2018 to discuss the chief of staff job, Melania sat in on the conversation. The three met alone in the private residence, and Christie said that Melania asked the key question: How would he deal with Jared Kushner? When Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey (and while he and his wife were Donald Trump and Melania’s regular dinner companions), he led a federal criminal investigation into Kushner’s father. Charles Kushner ultimately pleaded guilty to eighteen counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, shortly before Donald and Melania Trump were married, and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. As Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig would report in their 2020 book, A Very Stable Genius, after Christie left the White House, Trump personally leaked to Axios reporter Jonathan Swan that he had just met Christie and was considering him to replace John Kelly. The scoop was attributed to “a source familiar with the president’s thinking.” There was no mention of Melania’s being in the meeting. But while Trump leaks, Melania is known as the vault. She is the best keeper of secrets in the White House.
Trump is very concerned about his appearance, and Melania has tried to help improve how he looks. She has shared modeling tips: when someone is taking his photo, he can tighten and define his facial muscles by placing his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and if he stands slightly back in a group photo, he will appear thinner than if he is standing in front of others. Whether he heeds her advice that she has offered over the years, is, as she has said, “up to him.” However, before a photo shoot, she has been heard telling Trump to slightly lift and extend his chin. At the 2018 state dinner she organized for the French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, she was overheard “stage managing” Trump’s movements, as one person described it. Melania also installed professional lights in a White House room where the Trumps take many of their official photos.
THE 2020 election year may well put Melania center stage.
Three days before the 2018 midterm election, Melania gave permission for an email to go out to Republican voters under her name. The Republican National Committee knew that she didn’t want to campaign but asked for help, and she agreed. “Democrats and the opposition media are doing everything they possibly can to discredit Donald with false accusations by spreading their fake news,” Melania said in the fundraising email. “This is a battle we must win together. I’m asking you and other Americans across the country to personally register your support and help prove that the Democrats and media are wrong.”
Republicans lost their majority in the House of Representatives on Election Day. The new Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, started impeachment proceedings against Trump the next year. The House voted to put him on trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over allegations that he withheld U.S. military aid to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations that would benefit Trump politically. He became only the third president in history to be impeached, although the Senate ultimately voted not to remove him from office. Trump called the impeachment process “a witch hunt” and called Pelosi “very evil and sick.” While Trump was going through “hell,” as he called impeachment, Melania said little about it. She continued her low-key activities and tweeted a video of her East Room redecoration project and pictures of her reading to sick children. But behind the scenes, she was angry. She felt unfairly criticized, like her husband. She has called herself “one of the most bullied” people in the world and chided anonymous people who take hurtful shots at her online. She has also said that she has thick skin and prides herself on never appearing upset, even if she is.
At first she laughed about the FREE MELANIA signs that people carried in front of the White House, and the late-night comedy skits in which she was portrayed as being trapped. But it also bothered her that anyone thought that she was helpless or a hostage. Harder to laugh off are the critics of her husband’s politics who call her a Trump accomplice. They say she is complicit for not speaking out, not even about Trump policies that now make it harder for many foreigners to get into the United States. She has said repeatedly that she is independent and follows her own compass and has stressed that while she offers her husband advice, he makes his own decisions. But she also recognizes that the way people see her is often colored by the way they view her husband. She knows, too, that as she becomes a more visible campaigner in 2020, she will likely become more of a target. Still, she has told people she wants to win reelection, and, now that Barron is older, she is in a position to be more actively involved. It would be further vindication after the impeachment trial.
She has other reasons, too, for wanting to stay in Washington. In 2020, Barron was fourteen, and after a second term, he would be college age, a perfect time to move. An election defeat would require a disruptive change in the middle of the school year. A second term would also give her more time to make her own mark. “She is very happy being first lady,” said Paolo Zampolli. According to Zampolli, all those people who said she couldn’t wait to go back to her old life, that she hated politics, were just wrong. “I am telling you she is happy in the White House.”
Melania agreed to be the marquee name on two 2020 fundraisers, one in Beverly Hills and another at Mar-a-Lago. Concern about the spread of the coronavirus would cancel these events, but she was becoming a more active and visible campaigner. In 2016, that was unthinkable. “Neither of them wants a one-term presidency,” said a person who knows the couple. “She sees this as their legacy. She wants to win.” “It’s the bunker mentality,” added a White House official. Another used similar words: “They both feel under constant attack. They feel everyone is out to get anyone named Trump. That is a bond.”
On February 4, 2020, Melania looked more at ease than usual as she sat in the gallery of the House of Representatives, listening to her husband’s third State of the Union address. For the first time, she had ridden with him for the two-mile, ten-minute trip from the White House to the Capitol. In previous years, she had asked for a separate car, but this year she even agreed to be part of one of the speech’s dramatic, made-for-TV moments. Trump announced that he was giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, and that Melania would present it to him. Limbaugh, recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, was seated in the gallery next to Melania. The TV cameras zoomed in on Limbaugh and Melania to capture the announcement and his emotion.
As Melania draped the medal around his neck, many of the Democrats in the room were outraged. The Trumps were giving Limbaugh an honor reserved for the most admirable, inspirational, and accomplished people in American life. While Limbaugh is extraordinarily popular with many Americans, he has a long history of offending women, black Americans, Latinos, the LGBTQ community, and others, with comments such as, “Feminism was established so that unattractive ugly broads could have easy access to the mainstream.” But in the House chamber and in front of all those watching, Trump praised Limbaugh for “decades of tireless devotion to our country,” and Melania, who once might have stayed in the shadows at such a politically divisive moment, was front and center. A visual echo of her husband, she too wore a dark navy designer suit, a clear contrast to the sea of white worn by Pelosi and Democratic congresswomen in the chamber.
Two days later, Trump filled the East Room of the White House with those closest to him to celebrate the Senate vote to acquit him of impeachment charges. Melania sat in the front row and listened to his hour-long speech, in which he trashed FBI officials as “top scum” and Pelosi as a “horrible person.” He called the investigations against him “bullshit,” a word not normally heard at the microphone in the ornate East Room. Melania clapped along with Trump’s most fervent supporters. “I want to apologize to my family for having them have to go through a phony, rotten deal,” Trump said. “This was not part of the deal. They stuck with me.” He mentioned Barron, something he doesn’t often do. Trump called Ivanka up to the podium and they hugged. Then Trump looked at Melania, sitting in the front row, gazing up at him admiringly, as she has for more than two decades. “Come on, baby,” he said, motioning her up to the stage, where they received a long, standing ovation from their supporters. They had weathered impeachment, and now Donald and Melania Trump left the room to walk the White House’s red-carpeted hallway, holding hands, smiling, and together.
Within weeks, impeachment would fade from the national conversation as the coronavirus killing people in China escalated to become a global pandemic. On February 5, the day that Trump was acquitted by the Senate, the United States had twelve recorded cases of the novel coronavirus, and the World Health Organization reported that 99 percent of all confirmed cases were still inside China. But for weeks U.S. intelligence officials had warned the White House that the virus could pose a grave threat to the United States. Still, the president continued to downplay the threat into early March, even when it began taking its toll in the United States.
On March 5, Melania, too, seemed unconcerned, and posted to her 13 million Twitter followers about a very different subject, a renovation project: “I am excited to share the progress of the Tennis Pavillion at @WhiteHouse.” She tweeted pictures of herself wearing a white hard hat, studying blueprints on a plywood table near the White House tennis court. Many people criticized her of being tone-deaf, even comparing her to Marie Antoinette, the wife of the French King Louis XVI, who continued to spend lavishly while the country’s citizens suffered. Melania responded to her critics: “I encourage everyone who chooses to be negative & question my work at the @WhiteHouse to take time and contribute something good & productive in their own communities. #BeBest.” Defiantly, she reposted the original message.
But in the following days, as the White House and U.S. Capitol shut to outside visitors and COVID-19 became the worst pandemic in a century, Melania’s online messaging completely changed. On TV, her husband talked about the country “opened up and just raring to go” by Easter, April 12, but Melania cancelled the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll and donated its 25,000 commemorative wooden eggs to children’s hospitals and frontline workers. Over the next few weeks, as daily life in the United States ground to a halt and restaurants, stores, businesses, beaches, sports stadiums, and churches all shut down, she recorded public service announcements with practical information, including about social distancing. She talked about resilience and unity, saying, “Stay safe and remember, while many of us are apart, we are all in this together.” She thanked “doctors, nurses, and first responders,” and shared online resources, including how to listen to astronauts reading books in space. “Our great country is fighting hard against the #Coronavirus. This nation is strong & ready & we will overcome,” she wrote on Twitter. She also said, “If we support one another through this challenging time, America will come out stronger in the end.”
Her husband would frequently tweet more in one day than she would all month, but during the crisis Melania ramped up her use of Twitter to amplify advice from public health officials. Her messaging was often exactly the opposite of her husband’s. After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone wear a mask in public places, Trump announced he would not be: “I just don’t want to be doing, I don’t know, somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk—I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, I don’t see it for myself.” He also emphasized the guidance was “voluntary.” But Melania posted a photograph of herself wearing a mask over her nose and mouth, reminding people that it was the safe thing to do at a time when thousands of Americans were dying. She added, “Remember, this does NOT replace the importance of social distancing.”
Those who know the couple say Melania fills in Trump’s blind spots. Unlike her husband, she was warning that daily life could be different for quite some time, thanking health officials treating the sick, and publicly talking of working with other nations to defeat the disease. She began making calls to first ladies around the world, first checking in with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the wife of the Canadian prime minister who was herself recovering from the virus. Melania reached out to the daughter of the Italian president, a widower, and the wives of the leaders of Japan, France, and Germany. She offered condolences for the lives lost in their countries, and pledged unity in the shared crisis. According to an April 14 statement released by the Office of the First Lady, Melania and Elke Büdenbender, the wife of the president of Germany, “noted shared concern over some of the disinformation that has emerged, and committed to encouraging Americans and Germans to be cautious.”
Melania had first started talking about what type of first lady she would be more than twenty years ago, when her new boyfriend started flirting with a run for president. When she first arrived at the White House, she seemed halting, uncertain, and uncomfortable. But three years later, after a bruising impeachment process and in the midst of a devastating global health crisis, she seemed to find her footing and enjoy being a player on the global stage. Her message was realistic yet optimistic. As long as she was married to Trump, she would be associated with his deeply polarizing behavior that some loved and others despised. But the #FreeMelania signs were gone. She was increasingly seen as her own person. Melania had struck a complicated deal with a complicated man and taken on a complicated job. She wasn’t Jackie Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else who had held that role. She was Melania, and she would make this deal her own.