by Kate Bennett
The White House hosts hundreds of events every year, from lunches for world leaders and teas for their spouses to State Dinners to the Congressional Ball to public events like the Easter Egg Roll and holiday tours. Melania, by several accounts, is consumed with the mistress-of-the-house White House experience. “There’s so much to do here,” she reiterated at lunch.
But the “much” part for Melania is about picking the white roses or the cream ones, determining which tablecloths should be used at an event, or if the dessert that day should be a cranberry and honeycrisp apple crostata with vanilla bean ice cream (it was) or a chocolate cream pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream (a Trump favorite).
“But what does she do?” people ask when I say I cover the first lady for my job. It’s a good question, and a fair one, and difficult to answer with “she does a lot of stuff around the house.”
Melania seems to like the hands-on approach to being the female head of household, and it’s something she has done for many years, organizing and overseeing decorations and details from Bedminster to Mar-a-Lago. She is almost intimidatingly comfortable in the traditional role of wife and mother and always has been—there’s not one person who would say Melania was secretly harboring some ambitious aspiration to be a CEO or a successful entrepreneur.
Melania has few tangible job skills beyond being a warm and consummate hostess—unapologetically, this is her wheelhouse. As such, she’s very much involved in the minutiae, even though she doesn’t necessarily have to be. At Christmastime, when the White House decorations were unveiled—a pretty big to-do around those parts—a press release noted the wreaths hanging in each of the White House’s 147 windows were “designed by the first lady herself with signature style.” Yet they appeared to be your average wreaths with big red bows. Pressed on what made them “signature,” Stephanie Grisham, at a media preview of the holiday decor, said she would get back to the reporter who asked and hurried off to check with one of the decorators on Melania’s staff. “They’re made from white pine,” she announced on return. Ah.
When Michelle Obama was in her first term, someone who worked for her said she was more stringent about the details than she was later on, having tastings for important meals, often inviting her mother, Marian Robinson, who lived with the Obama family but had her own space on the third floor of the residence. Michelle and her mother and the social secretary would settle in at a table set up in the Yellow Oval Room, also part of the residence, and spend hours trying all the food. (Mrs. Robinson enjoyed the wine pairings at the tastings, which a staff member tells me made for a good time by the end of the meal.) Michelle was vocal about what she liked and what she didn’t like, but there were always plenty of options to choose from. However, by her second term, she was much less hands-on and more willing to experiment with food and florals and decoration.
Melania has yet to branch out significantly in her tastes, often sticking meticulously to white flowers, menus featuring Dover sole, and shades of ivory for decor. The one time she did stray off that course was her second holiday in the White House.
Melania revealed via a tweet in July that she was already working on the Christmas decor for the 2018 season, complete with a photograph of her going over pictures of ideas and mood boards. “There is still a lot of work to be done,” she tweeted, five months ahead of the reveal, “but I hope everyone will enjoy our final holiday vision for the People’s House.”
Most didn’t. She was eviscerated for lining the East Colonnade with bright red “trees” made from thousands of cranberries. The Twitterverse said the trees reminded them of blood, or the dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale. Media outlets had psychologists analyze why Melania chose to use red (the White House clearly stated in the press release about the decorations that the red was taken from the “pales,” the red stripes in the presidential seal, which stand for valor and bravery). Also, well, it’s Christmas. The trees were red; the carpet was green. It’s not rocket science. But, man, did Melania take a beating on those red trees. Yet the choice was classic Melania: she didn’t want to go with precedent; she wanted to step out of the box. Melania is one of few creatives who has ever been first lady—she actually has a background in design and fashion—so for her to apply a new and independent aesthetic to something as traditional and expected as White House holiday decorations was much more of a statement than the red trees themselves.
Jeremy Bernard, who was social secretary for four years under the Obamas, said it’s not uncommon for a first lady to get criticized for the holiday decorations. “You didn’t have enough Santas, or you had too many Santas. Or, it wasn’t at all religious, or it was too religious,” says Bernard, who agrees with me that the attacks on Melania over something as innocuous as holiday decorations were ridiculous. “You couldn’t win.” So meticulous have the rules for holiday decorations become, staff must ensure that every decoration is made in the United States, and every state must be represented; someone from the White House counsel’s office used to walk Bernard through every aspect of the displays.
When Melania finally addressed red tree–gate, she was refreshingly unapologetic. “We are in twenty-first century and everybody has a different taste. I think they look fantastic,” she told an audience a week after they went up.
Being physically careful with the decorations is just as important as being aesthetically careful, as Michelle Obama learned in 2014 when one of the large garlands hung in the State Dining Room crashed to the ground, almost taking out the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the volunteer holiday decorators who were standing underneath it. Large chunks of historic pilasters went with it; the hooks the carpenters had been using to hang decorations for decades apparently gave way. Since then, garland has never been hung above the Lincoln portrait, or any portrait for that matter.
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Despite the pounding she took in the press for staying in New York City for the five months from inauguration until Barron finished his year at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory in Manhattan, Melania has told those close to her she never even considered not doing it. Barron was and continues to be her first priority, and, whether the public liked it or not, she intended to keep it that way. She also admitted the plan had a bit of reverse psychology to it, something she smartly gamed out ahead of the move. As weekend visits to the White House increased through late winter, and as her son got more acquainted with the actual cool stuff about the place—the pool, the bowling alley, the movie theater, the Secret Service guys with their gear and their toys—Barron was more comfortable with the idea. By the time the cherry blossoms were on the trees in D.C. and before his school year in New York was out, he was ready. “Melania is one of those rare people who know on a cellular level that the only way to achieve what is expected of her and what she expects of herself is with patience and purpose,” one of her close friends explains to me when I ask her about Melania’s anxiety level during that period, when she had to shift from her old life to her new one. “She just always seems to know there is no rushing.”
Melania virtually ignored the flood of criticism that came her way for staying in New York City, despite the headlines about the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost taxpayers for Secret Service protection and the actual inconveniences posed to New Yorkers, plenty of whom were sick and tired of making way for Trump-generated motorcades and barricades and protesters.
Pundits in general had a field day with speculation about Melania’s not moving to the White House, something that had never been done before. She didn’t want to be first lady, they said. She considered herself too good for Washington, people whispered. And, the most fun gossip of all, she flat out didn’t want to be around her husband. It’s certainly quite feasible Melania wasn’t in a particular hurry to fling open the curtains on her private life to the rest of the world, but the idea that she never intended to move to Washington is patently false. She was picking where furniture should go from diagrams of the White House private residence and working with the Wh
ite House Historical Association to make sure she followed the correct guidelines of what was movable and what wasn’t long before her moving trucks arrived.
None of the Melania-won’t-move-here theories proved true, of course, and Grisham said as much when asked. “She plans to move to Washington as soon as her son finishes his school year,” she repeated, ad nauseam, to the press. But used to the fudged deadlines of her husband (his tag line would become “Let’s see what happens,” about everything from North Korean nukes to whether he would fire his chief of staff), the media didn’t believe her. Yet by this point one thing should have been clear to observers of Melania Trump and Donald Trump: she actually does what she says she will do, and in the approximate time frame she says she will do it. He does not. It’s part of the vast disparity of the East Wing and the West Wing. Melania’s statements are few and far between, but accurate.
Still, Democrats and anti-Trumpers were in disbelief over the idea that a first lady wasn’t moved in when her husband took office. “This isn’t how it’s done!” they cried, completely missing the error of their ways, the very one that plagued them throughout the election season. Comparing Trump to a paradigm of normalcy or to what had come before was an exercise in futility. They took the decision as evidence that Melania was intimidated by her new position, afraid to assume the historically relevant title of first lady, cowed by the process, when they should have seen it as the first sign that Melania has an independent streak on par with, or possibly stronger than, that of her most recent predecessors.
To that point, Michelle Obama, lest people forget, also toyed with the idea of not moving directly to the White House after inauguration and, instead, waiting until her young daughters, Sasha and Malia, finished their school year in Chicago. She went so far as to ask her husband’s aides if she even could delay moving in, an idea that was ultimately shot down in favor of “wanting her family to be together,” as Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett later said, according to one interview. But it is interesting that Michelle, too, seemed willing to disregard public perception and to at least explore the possibility. It reveals what must be a common trepidation for first ladies about giving up their “old” lives for the White House. First ladies, to be honest, have a more emotionally all-consuming adjustment to make as mothers and protectors, while their husbands are off and running to manage the country.
Melania approved the erection of a full-size soccer goal, with net, to be set up in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden south of the East Colonnade. For members of the press, who sometimes sit in vans along the south driveway, waiting for a motorcade to load up with the president or first lady, seeing the goal a few feet away is jarring. It feels remarkably out of place, like, “What’s this sports thing doing here?” That a tween boy lives in the house is forgettable in the swirl of the news cycle that his father creates at breakneck speed on a daily basis. The goal is actually a testament to the way Melania has devoted herself to keeping his life and his world private.
During the Obama years there was a sense of family, cultivated in a way, sure, with plenty of references to Sasha and Malia by their parents, always a handful of “Dad” jokes from the president; we never forgot the girls were there, even if we didn’t always see them. When Donald Trump moved in, one of the very first things he ordered was the removal of the swing set Obama had set up near the Oval Office. So much for kid play.
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A Most Independent First Lady
“Any channel she wants.”
—STEPHANIE GRISHAM
It was, and still is, a tricky thing, Melania’s relationship with the media. As the most popular Trump family member, a year into her tenure in the White House she had enjoyed relatively strong poll numbers without doing pretty much anything. She hadn’t announced an official platform, she hadn’t yet taken a major solo trip, she hadn’t given a major speech lasting more than two minutes since the campaign, and she spent the first six months as first lady not even living in the White House. All things considered, that she was polling well was a remarkable feat.
(In January 2018, after a run of headlines about Trump’s alleged cheating scandals, Melania had a 47 percent favorable rating in a CNN poll; Trump, just 40 percent. The same time one year before, just after the inauguration, she was only at 36 percent, with a whopping 23 percent saying they had no opinion of her, a stunning admission considering Trump had just been sworn in as president of the United States. By comparison, at that same point in her tenure, Hillary Clinton had an approval rating of over 50 percent; Laura Bush, first rated in a Gallup poll in 2003, was in the mid-70s for approval—insanely high; and, right after Barack Obama took office, Michelle Obama was polling at 72 percent. Trump, a fervent watcher of poll numbers, obsessed with likability, both his own and that of his adversaries and allies, addressed a black-tie dinner at the White House in 2017, praising his wife. “The star of the Trump family,” he said, adding, “they love her out there, I’ll tell you. We walked all over Florida. We walked all over Texas, and they’re loving Melania.”
Imagine what those numbers could be if Melania actually said something of major importance on a regular basis. Or if Americans were more freely able to know her—if she used the press in the way her predecessors had, doing regular interviews? In all her time as first lady, Melania has only twice come to the back of the plane during a trip to talk off the record with the traveling press pool, a fairly common and somewhat traditional practice for first ladies past. The first time happened when we were flying home from Canada after her first solo trip; she went to Prince Harry’s Invictus Games opening ceremony as a representative of the United States. The second time was when we were on our way to Africa, her first major international trip by herself. As the only reporter who is consistently part of Melania’s press pool, I always get a kick out of listening to other reporters on the plane who haven’t been on the beat ask each other if they think “she” will come back to the press area and talk to us. “Probably.” “Yeah, I mean, why wouldn’t she?” “She will.” I give it a few minutes and then I weigh in: “She won’t. She only has twice in almost three years. Trust me, she won’t.” I hate to burst the bubble, but like her husband, Melania doesn’t do things the “normal” way.
Melania’s argument against talking to the media? Essentially, “Why should I?” To be fair, it holds some weight. Opening herself to that type of scrutiny is not only something she doesn’t want to do but something she feels she doesn’t need to do. Like Trump, she is naturally, quite intensely, wary of the media—simply put, she doesn’t like us. She is a bit like Jackie Kennedy, who was also not a big fan of the press but who understood the part it plays in building a narrative. Kennedy helped craft her persona by manipulating the desire of the public to know more about her. She understood that remaining somewhat mysterious to the American public would compel them to always be curious about her. It was smart. And it worked.
Almost a year into her tenure as first lady, Melania decided to invite a handful of members of the media to get to know her in her new habitat. A select group of ten representatives, in pairs from each major television network—one bureau chief, and one reporter—had been asked to lunch, an off-the-record confab with Melania.
At this point Melania wasn’t eager to throw herself to the wolves (as she saw the press), but without throwing us the occasional bone, she risked having the mainstream media craft its own narrative, and Melania at least wanted to help control it. The White House luncheon was a small step in that direction, a chance for her to see that reporters don’t actually have scales under their clothes and for us to see, conversely, that neither does she.
A long table was set in the Blue Room, which is on the main floor of the White House, flanked by the Red Room and the Green Room and smack in the middle of Cross Hall, marked on opposite ends by the State Dining Room and the East Room. Throughout history, the Blue Room has been one of the most common locations for receptions and meetings, and Melania, since moving in, has taken a liking
to it as a place to host friends and dignitary spouses. She often has a small table set for tea or a light lunch when she and the spouse of a visiting leader are paired up while the heads of state meet in the Oval Office.
Like the Oval Office, the Blue Room is curved; it’s the middle of the building structure of the White House, directly above another popular space, the Diplomatic Reception Room, and directly below the Yellow Oval Room, a grand drawing room that is part of the first family’s private residence.
With its floor-to-ceiling french doors that open to the South Portico, the original room was destroyed in the White House fire of 1814 but brought back to life by James Madison three years later. Madison, a Francophile, had commissioned a furniture set from a French designer and textiles from France for the upholstery. But the color scheme for Madison was mostly red, and it stayed red through John Adams, until Andrew Jackson moved in and swapped out the red motif for green. It wasn’t until 1837, and Martin Van Buren, that the room became the Blue Room, and while presidents and first ladies renovated and redecorated through the years, the room remains predominantly blue in its decor, with blue upholstered chairs, replicas of the Madison-commissioned originals, and a gigantic blue oval rug with gold detail in the middle of the room.
For her media luncheon, Melania instructed her social secretary, Anna Cristina Niceta Lloyd (who goes by Rickie Niceta), that she would like the table to be set with the official Clinton china. Ironically, with its swirly gold border and gold White House model etched in the center of each plate, the Clinton china is the most Trumpian-looking of the official White House china sets. It’s a lot of gold and curlicues. Melania uses it often. One of the perks of living in the White House is having every set of official presidential china at your disposal, and each has its own style and feel. The Clintons’ is tasteful if not a touch gaudy. As of this writing, Melania has yet to reveal the design of the official Trump china, but she is working closely on the project.