She is a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in Valentino. One of the few things anyone can say with certainty about Melania Trump is that the former first lady has never been keen on politics. And who can blame her? Melania was living a life of untrammelled luxury before her husband decided he wanted to be president. She didn’t have to pretend to care about causes. She didn’t have to shake hands with paupers. She didn’t have to live in a shabby old house in DC. She could do whatever she liked. When Donald Trump got booted out of the White House, Melania didn’t seem particularly distraught.
Nor has Melania seemed especially enthusiastic about Trump’s attempts to weasel his way back into the presidency. The former model kept her distance from his 2020 re-election efforts and has been noticeably absent from the 2024 campaign. She attended the campaign launch event in November 2022 and showed up when Trump cast his ballot for himself in the Florida presidential primary last month, but that’s about it. She has been so absent that “Missing Melania” posters have been jokingly handed out at some of Trump’s campaigns by, rumour has it, his detractors.
But now the election is drawing closer, it looks as if Melania is officially back. She was photographed, with much fanfare, at a fundraiser in Florida on Saturday, which reportedly brought in $50m (£39.5m). She is also scheduled to hold her first big political event of the year later this month: a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of LGBTQ+ conservatives. The event is the launch of the group’s Road to Victory programme, which will target voters in swing states. Seven key battleground states will determine the election. Trump, according to a recent poll, is winning in six of them. Will Melania help them swing even further his way? Is she the secret weapon in his re-election attempts?
Her presence on the campaign trail certainly won’t hurt. It is true that Melania is not exactly a unifying figure and bears the dubious distinction of leaving the White House with a 47% unfavourable rating: the worst popularity rating for any first lady in history. Still, even if she is not universally loved, Trump looks a lot better to voters with his wife standing by his side than he does with her keeping a conspicuous distance. If it looks as though she can’t stand to be in the same room with him, it might give the impression that she is just a little bothered by the fact her husband is a legally defined sexual predator who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 25 women and is facing scores of criminal charges, including hush money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Early in Trump’s political career, Ivanka helped sanitise her father’s image among liberals, LGBTQ+ people and women. Trump’s elder daughter fashioned herself as a selfless crusader for women’s rights, and various anonymous “sources” (who may or not have been Ivanka’s PR people) often popped up in the news to explain that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, should be credited with stopping Trump doing something particularly nasty. In 2017, for example, it was widely reported that Javanka stopped Trump from issuing an executive order that would have rolled back LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace. With Ivanka staying out of the political spotlight and Jared too busy dreaming about ethnic cleansing and building waterfront property in Gaza to help his father-in-law campaign, it looks like the job of softening Trump’s image now falls squarely on his wife.
Trump has hinted very strongly that if he gets back in the White House his term is going to be focused on vengeance and mayhem. Trump the Sequel will be a lot darker and more dystopian than the original version: mass deportations, the dismantling of democracy, revenge on his detractors. All sorts of fun!
What might Melania’s second act look like? Probably more of the same. Which wasn’t much. While Melania had her Be Best initiative to combat bullying, she wasn’t a particularly industrious first lady. According to a book by Katie Rogers, a New York Times White House correspondent, Melania “avoided being overscheduled, and at times avoided being scheduled at all”. She apparently took to wearing elegant bathrobes “at all hours” and spent a lot of time redecorating and “assembling photo albums of her aesthetic contributions to the White House”. In short: if the Trumps reoccupy the White House, expect Melania to fiddle with the furniture while the world burns.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
