With Melania missing, her role in the post-conviction Trump campaign is more uncertain

It was a familiar routine in the Manhattan court where Donald Trump became a convicted criminal.

Before entering the 15th-floor courtroom for his trial each morning, the former US president would take a few steps down the hallway to deliver remarks to the assembled media.

As he turned and walked away, someone in the press pack would inevitably shout the obvious, unanswered question: “Where’s Melania?”

The absence of the former first lady during the six-week trial of her husband of 19 years has left many observers asking the same thing.

How much is she willing to put up for a man who betrayed and humiliated her? To what extent did she know about the porn star and the Playboy playmate at the centre of the hush-money conspiracy for which he has now been convicted?

And now that Trump is officially a felon, will she appear by his side as he campaigns to unseat President Joe Biden?

Asked how his wife was doing, Trump on Sunday insisted: “She’s fine, but I think it’s very hard for her.

“She has to read all this crap,” he said in a friendly interview on Fox and Friends.

He has also used his conviction to paint himself as the victim of a “rigged justice system” and warned that jailing him could prove a “breaking point” for his supporters ahead of November’s election.

Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Trump Tower the day after a New York jury found him guilty.Credit: AP

“I’m OK with it,” Trump said, but added he was “not sure the public would stand for it”.

But while Trump rails against the verdict, the former first lady has remained as elusive as ever.

Last week, as Trump’s legal team issued closing arguments in a futile bid to convince the jury of his innocence, three of the former president’s five children were seated behind him in the front row: Donald Jr, Eric and Tiffany Trump.

Eric and his wife, Lara, the newly installed co-chair of the Republican National Committee, had been at the trial in the days prior, too – ever since TV presenters began commentating on his lack of family and friends during his first few weeks in court.

And even Ivanka Trump, who was not at the trial and had previously announced her intention to step back from her father’s political life, broke her silence after he was found guilty of all 34 charges against him.

“I love you dad,” she posted on Instagram, alongside a childhood photograph of the pair.

Melania, however, was neither at the trial nor at Trump’s post-verdict press conference – despite reports that she had arrived in New York from their home in Florida with their son, Barron, the day the verdict was handed down.

Donald Trump and wife Melania with family members after the funeral for Ivana Trump in 2022.Credit: AP

Her absence spared her the indignity of having to sit in a cold and dreary courtroom in Lower Manhattan as her husband’s infidelities were laid bare, from his “brief” and unprotected sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, to his 10-month affair with former Playboy playmate of the year Karen McDougal, who says Trump told her he loved her “all the time”.

It was that infidelity, after all, that led to the criminal conspiracy and falsified business records for which Trump has now been convicted, months after a civil jury in New York also found him liable of sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.

The origin of that conspiracy started at a Trump Tower meeting in August 2015, between Trump, his lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, and tabloid king David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer.

It was two months after Trump and his wife famously came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce he was running for president.

As they sat in a room towering above Fifth Avenue, Pecker agreed to use his media empire to be the “eyes and ears” of the Republican’s 2016 election campaign by publishing favourable stories about him, running damaging stories about his opponents, and silencing any stories about Trump and other women, in a practice known as “catch and kill”.

“When you put all three of these components together, this scheme cooked up by these men at this time could very well be what got president Trump elected,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the court.

Adult film actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.Credit: AP

Speaking about the verdict for the first time, Daniels told the UK’s The Mirror tabloid that she was “shocked” at how quickly the jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise the $US130,000 ($196,000) she was paid to stop her from disclosing her 2006 tryst with the former reality-TV star.

Asked what kind of sentence he should receive, she replied: “I think he should be sentenced to jail and some community service working for the less fortunate, or being the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter.”

But Daniels wasn’t the only woman paid off on Trump’s behalf. McDougal was also given $US150,000 by Pecker’s company to bury a story about her relationship with Trump, which she says began in 2006 – and which she would later discover had overlapped with the Daniels tryst.

The former Playboy model didn’t testify, but during the trial, posted a photo of her legs immersed in a bubble bath, with Ronan Farrow’s book, Catch and Kill.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2018, she explained how the pair had met at a party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and hit it off instantly.

“There was a real relationship there, there were real feelings,” she said.

“What everyone sees on TV, I didn’t see in that man, because that man was very sweet, very kind and respectful, very loving, very caring – that’s the man I saw.”

McDougal says her first date with Trump took place on his birthday in June 2006 – three months after Barron was born – although it ended up on a sour note when he tried to pay her money after they had sex.

Despite the rocky start, McDougal says she fell in love with Trump, and the pair saw each other “dozens of times” throughout their affair – including at the Trump Tower residence he shared with Melania.

Eventually, though, she ended the relationship because she couldn’t deal with the guilt of being with a married man who was clearly not about to leave his wife.

“If Melania Trump is watching this, what would you want her to know?” Cooper asks her at the end of the interview.

“What can you say?” McDougal replies, choking back tears. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want it done to me. I’m sorry.”

Other witnesses provided alternative insights into the Trump marriage, which has lasted since January 2005. The pair met through businessman Paolo Zampolli in 1998 when Melania was a model for his agency.

Former White House director of Oval Office operations Madeleine Westerhout, for example, told the jury how Melania “was definitely the one in charge” and “their relationship was really special”.

Occasionally, she would hear Trump call his wife from the Oval Office and tell her: “Honey, come over to the window” so he could wave to her from her White House residence.

“I believe they have a relationship of mutual respect,” Westerhout said. “He cares a lot about her opinion. There was no one else who could put him in his place.”

Whether Melania Trump is putting her husband in his place now – or what role she may play in his campaign – is the great unknown.

Asked during the Florida primaries in February if she would make a return to the campaign trail, she simply replied, “Stay tuned”, but has not had a starring role at any of Trump’s rallies, primary victories or campaign events since.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to deny his affairs with both Daniels and McDougal, and insists he did not falsify business records to sway the 2016 election.

Melania Trump (in 2020) has not appeared on the campaign trail or at any of Trump’s court cases.Credit: The New York Times

Instead, he says, he is the victim of a rigged justice system for which he – and his family – are paying a high price.

“In many ways, it’s tougher on my family than it is on me,” he told Fox and Friends.

“I have a wonderful wife, but she has to listen to this stuff all the time. They [Democrats] do that for this reason. All these salacious names they put in of these people … They put this up to create havoc. These are bad people.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.