by Kate Bennett
The luncheon table was also set with loads of fragrant white flowers, Melania’s favorite, mostly cream and white orchids and freesia that lined the middle of the table from one end to the other in small silver bowls and even smaller silver julep cups.
After several minutes, in walked Melania Trump. At five foot eleven, she is a formidable presence. Dressed in a fitted gray sweater and black slacks, her signature 4.7-inch Christian Louboutin pumps added even more height to her stature. It should be said, Melania enters almost every room with a signature wave, a two-handed deal that resembles what a toddler does when she first learns how. Arms out in front, elbows bent upward at ninety degrees, palms facing forward, raise and lower fingers, raise and lower fingers, raise and lower fingers. It’s a friendly gesture and far more comfortable for putting others at ease than, say, Hillary Clinton’s perfunctory side-to-side wave or Michelle Obama’s full-forearm windshield wiper.
She smiled almost immediately, which quickly helped melt the formality of the occasion. The most common misperception about Melania is that she is cold, when she is frankly the opposite. Melania in person hits all the senses. “She’s quite possibly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” whispered one of the network guys to me after the lunch was over. He was glassy-eyed, almost in a daze, like he’d just lunched with a mermaid.
While she might not have been a supermodel, in real life Melania is uncommonly beautiful. In photographs, her eyes tend to look squinty, but in person they’re wider, and an almost otherworldly cobalt blue. Her skin? Luminous. Faux tanned, but not orange. Makeup? Flawless. Heavy around the eyes with liner, lashes for days. Smile? Hypnotic.
Then there’s the way she smells. She has a distinct, noticeable fragrance, even to those who generally don’t notice such things. It’s unique, so when it hits the nose, reporters know to get out our notepads and photographers know to put their fingers on the shutter button—you’ve got about two seconds of smell warning before she enters the room. Melania’s perfume is of unknown provenance, and apparently as confidential as a state secret. It may very well be off-label, custom-made—a mix of jasmine and lily and something more exotic, like oolong tea, cinnamon, maybe?
Her voice (“Hello, everyone”) is neither too high nor too low, and like most people for whom English is not a first language, it lilts upward at the end of sentences, as though each phrase is a question, and it often is, because she adds, “yes?” to the end of most of them. “Let’s have a nice lunch, yes?”
The people at the table were entranced; everyone nodded.
A White House butler offered white wine to guests, about half of whom accepted. But at Melania’s seat—she had placed herself at the chair closest to the door, by the way, facing the South Lawn—there was no wine. Instead, a tall glass of Diet Coke, no ice, appeared at her setting—so very European. Yet unlike her husband, who chugs the stuff all day, Melania barely took a sip. She also hardly touched the first course, a squash bisque served with shallot oil and pumpkin seed crisps. Like most models, it was clear somewhere along the way that Melania had mastered the fine art of looking like she was eating without actually eating. It’s a skill that involves maneuvering utensils around a plate or bowl, engaging the food, but not actually bringing the fork or spoon to your mouth more than two or three times.
“Ask me anything,” Melania said, the words every journalist hopes to hear from a subject but rarely does.
By the time the main course of potato-crusted Dover sole arrived, Melania had divulged more personal information than any members of the media had gotten from her in the eight months since her husband was sworn in. She was friendly and kind, open and real, and she had all of the fabled one-on-one charm and sensitivity that her husband is alleged to have when he’s in a similar situation. (“I actually like the guy,” admit some lawmakers, previously sworn enemies.)
When she is asked if the speculation that she wasn’t going to move to Washington ever prompted her to consider changing course and moving sooner, she smiles and says simply, “No.”
“I love living here,” Melania, seated to my left, says when I ask her whether the rumors are true that she feels like a prisoner and is miserable inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I don’t get it. All that ‘free Melania, free Melania.’ Why would I be unhappy here?” She gestured to her surroundings, the fabled opulence of the Blue Room, adding how she marveled at the history of the place, the grandeur and importance of what the building and the home represented.
Meanwhile, I was trying to hide my deep satisfaction at the surreal moment of having just witnessed Melania make a “free Melania” reference. In that quick flash of savvy, it was clear that even if she wasn’t an active participant in her press coverage, she definitely followed it—and her memes (and, as I would come to learn, perhaps guide it as much as she could behind the scenes).
Melania went on to talk about Barron and being a mother, and it all sounded so abnormally … normal. The life she described was not at all how the general public assumes the Trump family lives. For Melania, things like homework, play dates, and soccer practice were all paramount concerns, as with most parents of a child on the cusp of his teenage years. Making a home for Barron in the White House had taken Melania’s full efforts, and she was finally at a place where she felt comfortable, and where order was restored.
She even talked about how the family had considered getting a dog when they moved down to Washington and had gone so far as to investigate a few different breeds. Ultimately, they decided that a dog might be too much to handle for the time being and that anything but a small one wouldn’t work, because at some point they would have to move back to Manhattan, and how fair would it be to keep a big dog in an apartment? The journalists, most in their late thirties to late forties, and most with kids of their own around the same age as Barron, nodded in agreement: Melania had just managed to make them think of themselves as her peers, up against the same “Mom/Dad, can we get a puppy?” conundrum that she was. Melania, she’s just like us!
Soon the luncheon approached its second hour, a time limit virtually unheard of in the tightly controlled world of presidents and first ladies. Melania was asked about daily life with her husband, and her answers felt, well, normal. The picture of marriage that Melania laid out wasn’t that dissimilar to most couples, especially those who have been together for just shy of twenty years, as have the Trumps, who met in September 1998. In the evenings, they talk about the day, what’s going on with their child, any upcoming travel. Though she may have begun her tenure as first lady not wanting to delve into weightier matters, or the West Wing, she has become more involved, often talking to her husband about whom she trusts and whom she does not and about what the television networks are saying about him (networks other than Fox News, which is his preferred channel).
In one infamous example of his Foxaholic nature, The New York Times reported a story about Trump’s “raging” at his staff for not tuning Melania Trump’s television aboard Air Force One to Fox News. It was set to CNN, which made him angry. I asked Melania’s spokeswoman if the story was true (apparently The New York Times had not requested comment from the East Wing before running its piece). Stephanie Grisham told me the entire story was ridiculous considering the actual “work” Melania was doing on behalf of children and families. But she closed her rant to me by saying, “Seems kind of silly to worry about what channel she watches on TV (any channel she wants, by the way) or if she heard some recording on the news.” Naturally, that response, “any channel she wants,” became its own newsworthy tidbit, another assertion of her independence or, as some saw it, a snippet of resistance.
It should have come as zero surprise, even to the president, that Melania was monitoring other outlets besides Fox News. She has a deep capacity to remember which reporters are saying what about her husband and to take the temperature on the issues of the day. She regularly gives Trump her opinions, whether he wants to listen to them or not, but she does not nag. Her political lean
ings are similar to those of her husband—she is conservative. But when she disagrees, she says so. Melania was critical of the zero-tolerance policy of separating children from their families at the United States border. She said she was “blindsided” by the way it was handled and “heartbroken.” Yet when Trump tweeted that four female congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” even though three of the four were born in the United States, Melania was silent. Several days after the tweets, the story still had legs, and Trump was asked how his wife felt about what he said. “[Melania] feels very strongly about our country,” he said, adding that she thought the congresswomen’s feelings about America (which Trump viewed as overtly negative) were “horrible.”
The irony is that the only member of the four elected congresswomen not born in the United States, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, actually became a citizen before Melania Trump did. Omar, from Somalia, became a United States citizen in 2000, when she was seventeen years old; Melania became a citizen in 2006, when she was thirty-six.
Melania’s knowledge of national and global affairs does, like her husband’s, come mostly from watching television news and reading stories online from newspapers and other outlets. She is not versed in the writings of political thinkers, nor has she delved deeply into the history of America. But talk to her about current events and she’s more knowledgeable than your average Joe or Jane. “She keeps up with absolutely everything going on in politics,” says one of her close personal friends.
Of her ability to let her husband make his own decisions about how he handles the job, and his Twitter account, and to avoid being rattled when he is erratic about both, Melania to this day chalks it up to her firm belief that a leopard can’t change its spots. “I’ve always been that way. I take people the way they are,” she once said. “You could work your whole life to change them and they never will. What’s the point? They need to be who they are”—words of advice that pretty much everyone from those on Capitol Hill to those in the State Department, the media, and the West Wing, present and future, might want to let sink in.
As for what she does each day, that’s still evolving. Her public schedule remains relatively light compared with her most recent predecessors. That’s not to say she doesn’t have a lot that comes across her desk—she must make decisions about everything from event decoration and planning to what the theme of Halloween should be. There are an inordinate number of minutiae in the upkeep and preservation of the White House, all of which falls in her purview, and all of which she is hands-on about. She meets with people and keeps up with correspondence—all of which she does; she doesn’t delegate to her staff. There is nothing Melania hates more than someone speaking for her if she knows she can do so herself. It’s part of the reason her team is so small. She simply doesn’t want anyone else doing the talking.
Melania also frequently takes time off away from the White House, spending most of her non-Washington days at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach resort compound, where Melania hosts important holidays for the family: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Easter. In between, she flits back and forth between D.C. and Florida several times for long weekends, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barron, and on occasion with the president, who also enjoys time off at Mar-a-Lago to golf at his nearby resort. Melania must fly on a government jet, per security protocols, so the taxpayer expense for her jaunts is now well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Though less engaged in the general “work” of most first ladies, Melania has ceaselessly focused on her job as a mother, and she maintains that regularly scheduling time away from Washington, doing the things that she has done with her son since he was born, is just as important as, say, developing a policy base for her platform. This is not an exaggeration. For most first ladies, the compulsion, whether they had worked in full-time careers before the White House or not, has been to treat the role as a job. Melania has made it something else. Yes, she works at being first lady, she does the ceremonial parts of the gig, but there’s also the sense with her that it feels almost like it’s part-time. She has events, but only when she wants to have them, usually one to three a week, none lasting more than an hour, though typically they are far shorter. And she’s sparse on the extracurriculars. She doesn’t do the talk shows, she doesn’t make YouTube videos (like Michelle), she isn’t very interested in bolstering administration policy (like Hillary), nor has she participated in many interviews for television or magazines.
It’s that strange and unprecedented dichotomy that is Melania Trump. Should she be attacked for not being more consistently and devotedly dedicated to her “job” as first lady? Or should she be praised for always doing what she thinks is best and right for her, even if it means having way less of a public profile than her predecessors? After all, what kind of job is it that expects total passion and commitment but does not allow the jobholder to express true, personal convictions? For Melania, the role needed a cause, and so she conjured up Be Best, her platform for “helping children” that has three facets: overall well-being, social media kindness and safety, and care for children affected by the nation’s opioid crisis. It’s a lot, to put it mildly. And she hasn’t made it as impactful as the platforms of her predecessors; it doesn’t roll off the tongue like, say, Just Say No or Let Girls Learn. Not that Melania cares all that much—she’s just fine with keeping the initiative as it is and holding an event or two per month, mostly centered on kids. Maybe she’s learned the frustrating secret of being a first lady: no matter what you do or how you do it, you will inevitably be belittled. The inherent sexism of the role limits first ladies’ work to ornamental initiatives at the periphery of the national consciousness. Lady Bird Johnson, for example, had the forethought to think about the environment with her highway beautification project, but while she toiled to get an actual act passed in support of it in 1965, focusing on the conservation of scenic highways and securing federal funding, most thought she just wanted to plant pretty flowers.
A first lady isn’t necessarily responsible for anything—the description of the role is what each one makes of it. You can take a position on something or you can skip doing so altogether. Just look at Melania and cyberbullying. She knew that she would get blasted for including cyberbullying in her overall Be Best program (most Americans think that’s all it is), but she did it anyway. Her husband even told her it would be a bad idea. Trump was not unaware that his personal habit of trashing people on Twitter would open his wife up to a ton of backlash for taking up the cause. He warned her against doing it. She did it anyway and has faced the consequences.
She has meetings with her team most days, and she plots her next moves, trips, events, and outfits. She works to incorporate Be Best into programs that already exist, not ones that she has created from scratch. Be Best does not so much involve building something from the ground up—like Just Say No, literacy programs in schools, health and nutrition guidelines for kids—but having Melania endorse companies, programs, hospitals, and initiatives that are already in place. It’s a much easier way of doing things and, some would argue, smarter and more fiscally responsible. Partnering with programs in the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and Office of the National Drug Policy Council also keeps her staff to a minimum.
At twelve, Melania’s East Wing team is by far the smallest since Rosalynn Carter. Two of her recent predecessors had as many as twenty to thirty staffers on hand in the East Wing. Michelle Obama was the administrative head of a hospital before she became first lady; Hillary Clinton was a partner in a law firm. Both women had success leading large teams and directing strategy. Melania hasn’t had, nor has she requested, the sort of resources demanded by her predecessors to accomplish their lofty goals. Michelle Obama wanted to change school lunch programs and incorporate exercise programs into schools. Barbara Bush wanted to make sure every American learned how to read, and she got funding for her Foundation for F
amily Literacy. Hillary Clinton was so driven to make her “cause,” healthcare reform, succeed that she demanded a West Wing office so that she could have access to the infrastructure of the administration.
Unless something dramatic happens with Be Best, Melania’s legacy won’t be as a legendary champion of her three-pronged platform. I mean, can you name its three entities without going back a few paragraphs to check? And if people do recall the initiative long after her tenure as first lady is over, they will likely remember it for how the anti-cyberbullying stance was in marked opposition to the Twitter habits of her husband. Being Melania, she probably understands this. That she picked something to rally around that brought with it added complications because of her husband, thus making the fight against it more difficult, says a lot about who she is. Because, like Trump, Melania relishes a good “come at me” challenge. Go after her, if you will. She doesn’t really seem to care.
13
Cordial, Not Close
“Why Men Want to Marry Melanias and Raise Ivankas”
—JILL FILIPOVIC, OPINION IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
From the very beginning of his relationship with Melania, Trump had made clear that Ivanka was daughter dearest. If she wanted to appear with them at an event or on The Apprentice or on the red carpet for a movie premiere or a Fashion Week function, well, he had two arms, one to grasp Melania and one to grasp Ivanka. There are endless shots of the three of them together in the early 2000s, posed just that way. Whether he intended to or not, Trump set up his daughter and his third wife to compete. Both are beautiful, tall former models, and both are inextricably tied to the same man.