What next for Melania Trump? First lady insists on independence

A $40m documentary following her life, a meme coin to compete with her husband’s – and no ‘princess’ Ivanka in the White House. This time will look very different.

Melania Trump and Donald Trump dance at the Commander-in-Chief Ball. Picture: AFP

To her admirers, Melania Trump is a model of grace and composure, a strength and stay for her husband and altogether the snappiest dresser to occupy the White House since Jackie Kennedy.

To her critics, she is a latter-day Marie Antoinette – aloof, tone-deaf and busy using her place in the public eye to flog books and baubles.

But whatever you think of her, Melania Trump, 54, is back: more confident than last time, determined to expand her projects and ready to bring the business of being first lady to a screen near you with the aid of a documentary team that is following her into the White House.

“She will still do what she wants, when she wants,” Mary Jordan, author of the biography The Art of Her Deal, said.

“But she is more confident because she knows the ropes. She really didn’t expect [Trump] to win last time, and she had no political experience.”

Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts as Melania Trump holds the Bible in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. Picture: AFP

There were suggestions, that first time around from 2017-2021, that she was in competition with her own stepdaughter Ivanka, 43, who was sometimes referred to as the “first daughter”. Melania and her friends referred to her as “princess”, according to Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser and author of the memoir Melania and Me.

Melania was also initially absent from the White House – at a reported cost in flights and policing of at least $125,000 a day – insisting that she needed to remain in New York to allow Barron to finish his school year.

This time, Ivanka is not returning to the White House and Barron, 18, is at university.

“The first time … I just feel that people didn’t accept me, maybe,” she told an interviewer on Fox News in the run-up to her return.

“They didn’t understand me the way they do now, and I didn’t have much support. Maybe some people, they see me as just the wife of the president, but I’m standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts.”

Melania Trump says she has her own thoughts. Picture: AFP

Occasionally during Trump’s first term, the independent spirit of the first lady led to suggestions she was secretly unhappy about her husband’s election.

At a ceremony the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Melania smiled when her husband turned to look at her, and then scowled when he turned away.

“Twitter went nuts and the hashtag FreeMelania was born,” Winston Wolkoff wrote in her memoir. She said Melania explained that Barron, fidgeting, had inadvertently kicked her ankle, but she saw no point in correcting the record. “She said: ‘Who cares what they think? … I don’t owe them an explanation’.”

She frequently cut a sphinx-like figure beside her perpetually talkative husband. She was also absent for much of Trump’s 2024 campaign, grieving for her mother who died last January.

But in October she released a memoir, Melania. Short and sparsely written, it nevertheless offered an insight into the mind of a woman who remained a puzzle to many of her fellow Americans. It became a bestseller.

“I got so many messages and letters”, she said, from people “who would like to hear more from me … So I had the idea to make a movie, to make a film about my life.”

Production began in November and, in what appeared to be a first for a first lady, shooting is to continue as she moves into the White House and establishes her office. Amazon Studios is said to have paid $40 million for the film.

One interviewer inquired, a little tentatively, if she planned to actually live in the White House. “I will be in the White House,” she replied.

She also plans to revive her campaign against cyberbullying, titled: Be Best.

In her book, she said she anticipated some criticism “in the light of Donald’s social media behaviour”, but she laments that “the media attempted to diminish this remarkable initiative” with questions about her grammar. She felt the title “projected strength, positivity and confidence”.

Jordan, her biographer, felt the initiative was ill-defined. “Laura Bush was about reading, Michelle Obama was about exercise and diet,” she said. But “she’s doubling down on Be Best,” Jordan said. “It’s very much the Trump playbook.”

So too, is a willingness to trade on the Trump name. “Usually first ladies write a book after they leave,” Jordan said. “She’s selling ornaments, she’s selling jewellery.”

On Friday, her husband launched a cryptocurrency token – a “meme coin” that swiftly rose in price but faltered on Sunday. Some observers linked its drop in price to the launch of a rival digital token, appealing to a similar market. “You can buy $Melania now,” the next first lady announced on social media, on the eve of the inauguration.

The Times