So Melania wasn’t being held hostage after all. But is Donald Trump?
As he announced his White House bid, Donald Trump’s first lady was by his side. Trump’s most desired prize, the US presidency, is impossible without her.
In the blast of publicity Donald Trump orchestrated and received for the announcement of his third run at the United States presidency on Tuesday, it was overlooked who else was running again too. His wife. After Melania and her husband left the White House, the couple’s main residence has been Trump’s Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has previously referred to as the “winter White House”. Here the set-up is almost like a re-enactment of their time in Washington: separate suites for him and her, she to spend time either with her 16-year-old son, Barron, and her parents, also installed in the building, at the spa or alone.
But for the public event, their joint evening dinner, the couple are a united front. They wait, according to Trump’s long-time biographer Michael Wolff in his latest volume, Landslide, until the restaurant is full. Then they appear to a standing ovation and walk to their table, centre stage of the patio, which is protected by velvet ropes. There they are stared at while they eat. Wolff, who was once invited to sit at the table with the couple in this courtly arena, said it gave him the impression of a couple getting married, every single night. That, or “zoo animals”.
We all knew the joke. That Melania was held hostage in her marriage until her husband’s presidency was finished. A multitude of memes imagined the prenup that released her like a fairytale from the beast’s lair, but only once her contract had been paid in full, itemised like a bill for each time she put on the painful sky-high Manolo Blahnik stilettos to appear supportive at rallies. Unlike any modern first lady, she was seen infrequently and spoke less. Once, disembarking from the official plane in Israel, she batted away his hand in front of the camera. When she smiled the angles of her blank face remained unchanged: a rictus smoulder from her modelling days when she was paid to show up and sell product. A decade ago Melania tweeted a photo of a beluga whale. The whale has dark eyes, almost as if rimmed in heavy make-up, and frozen, glossy skin. There are no other clues as to her intellect. “What is she thinking?” Melania captioned this tweet.
At the time it seemed like a knowing tease. It encouraged a projection of this semi-serious story: Melania was a kind of sleeper cell, an unwilling mercenary. A strange conflation of liberalism and patronising sexism led to the #freemelania hashtags. At the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, protesters even displayed banners with slogans such as: “MELANIA: BLINK TWICE IF YOU NEED HELP”. As soon as Trump’s power left him, so too would his third wife.
This week, we can see the joke was not just wrong but backwards. It is not, or rather no longer, that the Slovenian-born Melanija Knavs owes her ascendency in the United States to Donald Trump. It is that Donald Trump’s most desired prize, presidency of the United States, is impossible without Melania. She comes from Europe and it is better to imagine this situation through the lens of European royal feudalism. Her attitude is certainly queenly: never complain, never explain. The slogan that would come to define her was written on the jacket she chose to wear to visit migrant children: “I really don’t care, do u?” But in the court of Mar-a-Lago, she as queen has her husband in checkmate.
Trump separated from his first two wives while they were in their thirties (Marla Maples) or early forties (the late Ivana Trump). At 52 (to her husband’s 76) Melania is his oldest and longest-running spouse. Is it because, three times a charm, Trump has finally found his soulmate? Or is it because it is Trump, not her, who is held hostage by his partner?
In this reading Trump is a little like Henry VIII, abruptly stopped midway through his spouse-spree by a woman who holds ultimate power. He could not have become president the first time without Melania’s loyal acceptance of his behaviour captured in recordings of her husband talking of “pussy-grabbing”. He certainly could not become president again, especially for the more conservative Republican Party, newly divorced from a woman with closets full of kompromat on him, however tight the non-disclosure agreement. The pair have a marriage contract, and a prenuptial contract, and a deeper political contract that tilts the balance in her favour, and has longer to run than most predicted.
So at the Mar-a-Lago launch of his run for the presidency, Melania was there, as she is in their dinner appearances at the same venue, waving at supporters before sitting next to Barron to gaze at her husband. Of note: she is now the only female star of this show. Gone was Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who issued a statement saying, “I do not plan to be involved in politics.” Hers was an uneasy stepmother truce, according to Mary Jordan, the Pulitzer-winning journalist for The Washington Post, who, after covering Melania for four years, wrote her biography, The Art of Her Deal.
When Trump took power, Ivanka established herself in the West Wing and eyed up rooms in the East Wing too, the domain of the first lady. Jordan reports that Ivanka wanted to rename the first lady’s office the “First Family’s Office”. Melania refused. The Secret Service nicknames for President Trump and his Flotus were, flatteringly, “the Mogul” and “the Muse”.
Jordan reports that Ivanka, when younger, called Melania “the Portrait”, as she spoke so little. Meanwhile, Jordan said Melania has been overheard referring to Ivanka as “the Princess”.
The story of the years since 2016 is a story of Melania’s stealthy – almost silent – increase in influence, the absence to Ivanka’s oppressive presence. For Trump, this may be a third run at the presidency. For Melania, with her son now nearly independent and her meddlesome stepdaughter off the scene, this may be a first run at first lady.
Initially, theirs was a crude deal. Trump was a Manhattan “modeliser” in need of another wife and Melania studied all his books. In The Art of the Comeback (1997) Trump said about women: “There is high maintenance. There is low maintenance. I want no maintenance.” Melania would be “no maintenance” to the point of vanishing: she assiduously rubbed out her previous friendships, there were no bridesmaids at her wedding. This became her single most effective tactic. In a rare interview Jordan pressed the first lady for “the correct description of you”. Melania replied: “I know what I want, and I don’t need to talk.”
In 2005 Melania the newlywed was asked, when addressing a business class at New York University, whether she would be with her husband if he wasn’t rich. “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?” she answered. It was a Manhattan moment: a cynical trade. Perhaps this is why so many people, and particularly women, bought into the “free Melania” fantasy. It’s embarrassing to modern love idealists that relationships can still be based on this medieval exchange of capital.
Trump didn’t drink or do drugs, he was solitary. Her too. He was an incontinent logorrheic, she strategically mute, but they share a petulant pout and a knack for maximising assets. Since leaving the White House Melania has auctioned off trinkets such as a typically face-obliterating wide-brimmed white hat she wore for the state visit of the French president in 2018. This is unheard of: former first ladies typically donate iconic outfits to museums. An undisclosed proportion of the proceeds were said to go to charity. Likewise there is no indication that the couple are anything other than politically aligned: a secret recording of Melania released in 2020 by her former friend and adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has her saying of the Mexican migrant children that many are cheating the system.
“A lot of, like, moms and kids, they are teached how to do it,” Melania says on the tape. “They go over and they say, like, ‘Oh, we will be killed by a gang member, we will be, you know, it’s so dangerous,’ ” she added, mimicking a dramatic voice. “So they are allowed to stay here. It’s not true that they would.”
But that didn’t mean their pairing was without affection. “She was always looking at him like he was God, and he was looking at her like she was a goddess,” said Antoine Verglas, who photographed her nude on Trump’s plane for GQ, in Jordan’s book. Michael Streck, a journalist from the German publication Stern, reported that during their interview Trump summoned Melania and ordered her to twirl so that Streck could admire all of her. Streck said later “the cattle show” made him squirm, but Melania was “comfortable”.
Jordan’s book describes the key moment in 2016 when the “pussy-grabbing” tape was played to Trump, who was with Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor. Christie noted the date stamp of the tape, September 2005, when Melania would have been three months pregnant with Barron (later in 2018 the Stormy Daniels story would break, in which the porn star alleged that Trump had an affair with her in 2006, a few months after Melania gave birth).
Jordan quotes Christie as saying Melania was the one person Team Trump was focused on, sitting 30 floors above them in the Trump Towers penthouse. If she walked out, the campaign was over. Trump seemed frightened to face her, and took two hours to step into the lift. According to Jordan, no one has seen Melania cry. Instead she goes icy when furious. “Now you could lose,” she apparently told Trump, according to sources in Jordan’s book. She retreated to her bedroom. In particular she hated people feeling sorry for her. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said in her next TV interview to CNN, “I can handle everything.” In the same interview she also undermined the women who came forward to accuse her husband of sexual harassment: “Did they ever check the background of these women?”
Instead, she realised retreat was power. It wasn’t a tactic effective with the American voters: Melania finished her tenure in 2021 as the least popular first lady yet, according to surveys by CNN, SRSS and Gallup. But it was effective with her husband. She stayed in New York for months after Trump moved to the White House. Jordan argues that Melania used the fact that her absence in Washington was increasingly embarrassing to Trump to renegotiate a better prenuptial contract – an act she described as “taking care of Barron”.
The way she punishes Trump is to “be invisible”, Jordan says. For example, around the time of the Stormy Daniels scandal, she, at the last minute, didn’t get in the car with Trump for the state of the union address, a ten-minute car ride. He hates this shaming abandonment. Jordan said Melania works hard at remaining mysterious, as it is her currency. Associates would only talk “on the same encrypted phone apps used by spies and others in the intelligence community. Old photos that were once an easy Google search away no longer pop up online.” Trump is reported to call Melania first after his big speeches. He believes he can trust her like no other adviser as his success is her shared agenda. And his success depends on her kingmaking presence.
“The best thing you can do is to deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.”
Trump simply can’t do without Melania. Which leads us back to Melania’s question. What is the beluga whale thinking? Probably something to do with survival.
The Times
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