Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  On January 20, ten days before the State of the Union, Melania posted a photo on her Twitter and Instagram accounts marking the one-year anniversary of her husband’s becoming president. The photo and the caption were striking: neither had anything to do with Donald Trump: “This has been a year filled with many wonderful moments. I’ve enjoyed the people I’ve been lucky enough to meet throughout our great country & the world!” were the words that accompanied a picture of her from Inauguration Day 2017, smiling in her baby blue Ralph Lauren suit and matching leather gloves, arm in arm with a tall, handsome-looking military escort, hat positioned low, covering his eye, who was definitely not her husband. With this simple post, Melania was saying something about her mood, her year, and her emotional state. She was marking the one-year anniversary of her own role, no one else’s. She was telling everyone, I can and will, if I need to, do this by myself.

  Two days later, January 22, neither she nor Trump would publicly acknowledge another anniversary, this one more personal to the couple: their thirteenth wedding anniversary. The absence of a post or a tweet was even more conspicuous to a country coming off eight years of the mushy anniversary messages of love between Barack and Michelle Obama. Trump and Melania were crickets.

  And then, later that same evening, I reported that Melania was canceling her trip to Davos, Switzerland, to join the president while he attended the World Economic Forum. I made sure the story was accurate, double- and triple-checking sources, because just the week before I had reported, with White House confirmation, that Melania would be going to Davos and that, per her spokeswoman, she would be there to show support for her husband, as she had done on his previous international trips up to that point. Not so much anymore, apparently.

  Before my story on Melania’s trip cancellation went live, I asked Grisham to comment on the reason, and she said simply that the decision was based on “scheduling and logistical issues.” I pressed more, laying it on thick, asking if the first lady would be disappointed that she wouldn’t be present to watch as her husband spread his message of making America great again abroad to a powerful mix of business and financial leaders and to take in another important milestone of the Trump presidency? She paused and reiterated: “scheduling and logistical issues.” I had offered her the opportunity to answer a different way, and she didn’t.

  By January 26, as Trump was returning from the Davos trip, Grisham tried to put out the growing fire of speculation about the state of the first couple’s marriage—over the weekend it had reached satire status in a skit on Saturday Night Live. “BREAKING: The laundry list of salacious & flat-out false reporting about Mrs. Trump by tabloid publications and TV shows has seeped into ‘mainstream media’ reporting. She is focused on her family & role as FLOTUS—not the unrealistic scenarios being peddled daily by the fake news,” Grisham tweeted.

  She was yelling into the wind. The story wasn’t extinguishable. In many ways, however, I understood what Grisham was saying, as I watched and read and listened to other reporters from different outlets and networks than my own catapult their version of events into the thick soup of gossip and innuendo about the Trump marriage. We are a nation built in many ways on popular culture, and we have a popular culture president.

  Everyone was hearing something, about the prenup, about her moving back to New York, about her trying to sell her jewelry, about how she’s interviewing divorce lawyers. And a personal favorite, one that made the rounds among my sources for months and months, and which some people still believe to this today: Melania was living not at the White House but, instead, at a home occupied by her parents and her son in Potomac, Maryland. And on and on. All I could do was dig, and report, and dig, and report—and I honestly couldn’t find substantial evidence of any of those things, including the house, which had then reached urban legend status. Believe me, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  January was rough. Melania was starting to emerge from the Daniels saga, but doing so slowly, having not quite found it in her to completely rejoin the program. “Not good,” was how I was told things were when I checked in with White House sources on her mood. While outwardly her willingness to accompany her husband on a day trip to Cincinnati, Ohio, a week after the State of the Union to champion his new economic plan signaled support, Melania actually used the occasion not to be present for her husband’s speech but to create an agenda of her own.

  When Air Force One landed in Ohio, she didn’t hold his hand while walking down the steps, instead keeping her arms at her sides, her trusty coat-over-shoulders move concealing her hands. At the foot of the stairs down from Air Force One, the couple split up; she sped off in her own motorcade, bound for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to visit with medical experts and ill children. He went to his speech. Though they met back at the plane for the flight home later that day, Melania arrived first, sequestering herself aboard Air Force One until he got there.

  “This isn’t a couple who is joined at the hip” was a familiar refrain from someone who knows both of the Trumps and had witnessed them spending periods of time apart and still very much functioning in their brand of marriage. “She never feels like she has to do whatever it is he is doing. It’s not like that. That’s not their marriage; that’s never been their relationship.”

  “I have my own mind. I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me,” Melania has said. But with each public fray, Trump appeared in the doghouse, something he was maybe accepting but definitely not liking.

  On the Saturday night before Valentine’s Day, the first couple went to dinner together at the BLT Prime by David Burke steakhouse inside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, the only restaurant they have ever gone to for “date night” since moving to D.C. It was a sign that perhaps Melania’s iciness was thawing. They chatted with each other, talked to the chef, to the staff; Trump had his usual: shrimp cocktail, boneless New York steak, and french fries. Melania ordered her favorite fish: Dover sole.

  By Valentine’s Day, she had resumed her somewhat normal first lady public schedule, visiting sick children at the National Institutes of Health’s Children’s Inn in Bethesda, Maryland, about a thirty-minute motorcade ride from the White House. I covered that appearance and spent most of the time just a few feet from the first lady. Melania seemed happy to me, but then again, she almost always lights up around kids. It’s one of the few times she lets her guard down, when that Slovenian stoicism melts away.

  Unfortunately, the warmth and happiness that Melania exudes when she is around children is not something the public necessarily gets to see, because her husband usually sucks up all the oxygen in the daily news cycle. Also, at this point, she hadn’t fully formed an official platform or agenda and rarely made remarks at these events and visits, making television coverage difficult to obtain. It’s left to those of us members of the press who cover the first lady’s events, usually me and five to ten other people, to tell the story of her events and visits as best we can, good or bad.

  Melania genuinely enjoys spending time around children. Her whole demeanor changes. She laughs, she hugs, she gets down on the floor and plays or works her fingers around arts and crafts or other projects, as she did that day, making Valentine’s cookies with a little girl named Lucie, who at nine years old had already made twenty-nine visits to the Children’s Inn so she could receive treatment and be studied for the rare immunodeficiency disease from which she suffers. “Do you like to play and run around with your friends?” Melania asked her, as the two rolled out dough and sprinkled heart shapes with colored sugar. Clearly relaxed, enjoying herself, Melania visited another group of young patients, passing out White House–branded Valentine’s cards of her own, printed with red and pink hearts. One young man in the room gave Melania a pair of black Children’s Inn sunglasses, to which the first lady, known for wearing her giant shades on most occasions, said, “These are very fashionable. I love sunglasses.”

  At the end of her visit, Melania was presented with a
painting of a colorful heart and the words “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mrs. Trump.” I watched her face as she looked at it. We all did. There had been no recognition from her husband so far that day about how much he loved her or how special she was. Here, these sick little kids, unaware of the soap opera story line Melania had endured during the past few weeks, had taken time to paint a piece of artwork for her, a big red heart smack dab in the middle of it.

  Whatever the gesture meant to her in the broader context of her current state of emotional affairs, she was clearly moved, her voice quavered slightly as she thanked the children and staff. “I will treasure all of this,” Melania said, accepting her painting from the kids. Her new friend Lucie rushed in for a hug.

  Melania and Trump would not publicly acknowledge the holiday. My requests to the White House communications departments in both the East Wing and West Wing as to how the first couple planned to celebrate went unanswered.

  Two days later, as the dust appeared to be possibly settling on Stormy Daniels, another cheating scandal emerged. This time, the other woman was Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate whom Trump was alleged to have seen for several months in 2006 and 2007, even spending time in Melania’s New York City home when she wasn’t there. Again, Trump denied the affair. The story broke in a New Yorker piece written by Ronan Farrow; the tale of the tryst was detailed and explicit, and the damage in terms of humiliation and emotional toll would be far more intense for Melania than the one-night fling Daniels had alleged.

  That same afternoon as the McDougal story came out, Melania and Trump were slated to go to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, but as the press gathered in their usual post to watch them depart the South Lawn on Marine One, a regular occurrence not only for the Trumps as they left for a trip but also for most modern first couples for the last two decades, only Trump emerged from the White House.

  Surprise. Melania had once again taken a separate mode of transport, leaving Trump alone for a walk of shame across the lawn and a solo ride on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland.

  “It was easier to meet at the plane at Andrews” was the reason Grisham gave me when I asked why Melania had opted not to take the helicopter with her husband, and she did not explain further how driving eighteen minutes on the road with the added staff and expense of law enforcement escorts in the motorcade was “easier” than taking a four-minute helicopter ride above traffic. Also, according to my calendar, she had no public schedule of events that day, so there was nothing she was rushing to or from to make the plane. In that moment—again, purely visual, not verbally spelled out—it was apparent that Melania was not keen to do the couples’ walk across the lawn of the White House that day, or maybe ever again.

  It’s an iconic first-couple moment, the walk to Marine One. Those of us remember when Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton walked toward the massive chopper after news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged, Chelsea Clinton walking between them, her hands linked on one side to Mom and the other side to Dad. Jackie Kennedy, through her husband’s long-rumored affairs, became, like Melania, adept at manipulating images to portray her solitude, her loneliness. She wasn’t a fan of putting Caroline and John Jr. in front of the cameras, but she would on occasion make sure there were plenty of shots of the three of them alone, without the president, to shore up public sympathy.

  Being first lady is a symbolic role; it’s not made to include the complicated gray areas of reality or private emotions or personal woe. The first lady’s job is to be a wife—devoted but not overly so. She’s supposed to be supportive but not cloying. She is expected to accompany but not get in the way. She’s the partner, but she should also have her own agenda. When you think about it, it’s sort of a massive burden, a fight between what you want the public to see and what you are going through in private. The persona she must carry with her always is a weight; one can only assume it gets even heavier when, emotionally, the last thing she wants to do is pretend everything is fine, when she really can’t stand to be in the same room as her spouse.

  That Melania defied the normal expectation, that she didn’t get in the motorcade with him, that she didn’t go with him on a trip, that she wouldn’t fake a walk together across the lawn—all of that makes her incredibly modern. Melania Trump is the first first lady to put her hand up and say, no, I’m not going to do this, even if I’m “supposed to.”

  While the media went gaga over another public snub, I kept thinking to myself: Why shouldn’t Melania be able to be pissed? Should she maybe even be applauded for not doing the doting-political-wife thing that America has witnessed so many times after a man in a position of power has done some abhorrent thing? Isn’t the fact that she is humiliated and angry and annoyed that—again—she’s faced with this a sufficient explanation for why she doesn’t want to spend one-on-one time with him for the cameras?

  “For all the talk of progressiveness in Washington, political insiders have a preset and admittedly chauvinistic viewpoint for what the role of the first lady should be,” a former staffer tells me, “so when someone like Melania Trump threatens to smash that narrative, they try to tear her down.” The fact that she refused the grip-and-grin with Trump, holding his hand while the cameras were on them, likely dropping it when they were out of sight, felt utterly authentic. For a first lady that people complain is too icy, too removed behind her sunglasses, she was being remarkably candid and transparent. But for whatever reason—she’s the unsmiling model, the vapid trophy wife, the woman who married “him”—the public has trouble connecting Melania Trump with the idea of authenticity. They can’t see past the narrative they want to believe, that has been spun along political and partisan lines.

  Upon landing in Florida for that long weekend, after his solo walk of shame and her private motorcade, Melania put duty ahead of her feelings. The Parkland school massacre had happened just before the trip, and the Trumps went to local hospitals to meet with victims, doctors, and first responders. At those sorts of visits, and there have been plenty of them, sadly, Trump is often softer and more vulnerable than he is outside of tragedy. This side of her husband is something Melania has always been attracted to, says a close personal friend; she is drawn to his sweetness. At Mar-a-Lago, after their afternoon hospital visit, the Trumps sat together, the two of them alone on a bench outside one of the ballrooms, where a preplanned, disco-themed event was taking place. They were huddled together, laughing quietly, looking cozy after a day that had begun with brutal headlines and separate transportation. It appeared to end with bonding. By Sunday night they were back in Washington at the White House, she in a glamorous and sexy black lace gown, he in a tuxedo, as they strode into the State Dining Room to host the Governors’ Ball, together.

  The roller-coaster ride of their relationship continued throughout that spring, but Melania carried on, as she typically did in her marriage to Trump, going about her business and her schedule, not worrying about his, focusing on Barron and keeping him protected from the headlines as best she could. Trump’s moods, and the drama of the legal issues conjoined with Daniels and the Russia investigation, his record-breaking staff turnover in the West Wing, and his blistering attacks on enemies, weren’t anywhere near the top of her list of concerns. “Melania is in no way codependent on anyone, her husband included,” one of her close personal friends tells me. She soldiered on, relying on that friend and a small handful of other confidants, many of them still in New York City.

  On March 22, another bombshell. Karen McDougal’s interview with Anderson Cooper aired on CNN. The former Playboy model was trying to fight a catch-and-kill deal she had made with American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, which purchased the story of her alleged affair with Trump for $150,000 and then spiked it when he ran for president.

  To Cooper, McDougal revealed details of what she says was a ten-month tryst with Trump, one that she says included “feelings.” McDougal said she and Trump saw each other a minimum of five times per mon
th, starting in the summer of 2006, just weeks after Barron was born. “Did Donald Trump ever say to you that he loved you?” Cooper asked. “All the time. He always told me he loved me,” McDougal replied. “When I look back, where I was then, I know it’s wrong. Like, I’m really sorry for that,” said McDougal, who said she never really talked about Melania with Trump, but that he once gave her a tour of their penthouse, pointing out a room that was Melania’s, where she went when she wanted to be “alone.” Via CNN, she apologized to Melania. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want it done to me. I’m sorry.”

  The very next day, Melania was due to give a speech at the State Department honoring, of all things, the annual Women of Courage Award. I was curious if she would back out, considering that the salacious interview with her husband’s alleged mistress had aired just hours before. But Melania did not cancel and, instead, focused her brief remarks on the meaning of courage. “Courage sets apart those who believe in higher calling and those who act on it. It takes courage not only to see wrong, but strive to right it. Courage is what sets apart the heroes from the rest; it is equal part bravery and nobility.” The speech was written in large part by Grisham, by now a trusted aide; Melania had made only a few changes.

  Outwardly it may appear as though Trump has the power to play God with her emotional well-being, but I suspect that it’s a very different power dynamic on the inside. Trump, by several accounts, is desperate for her approval, and he relies on her—her punishing coldness in the wake of the affair headlines and rumors took a toll on him. His moods in the West Wing at the time rolled from aloof and distracted to straight-up sour and fuming.

  According to Bob Woodward’s book Fear, Trump was concerned about how Melania would react to the stories of dalliances with Russian prostitutes, telling his lawyers, “I’ve got enough problems with Melania and girlfriends and all that. I don’t need any more. I can’t have Melania hearing about that.” However, a former West Wing staffer who was frequently present in the Oval Office with the president told me that when the story about Trump and the alleged Russian hookers broke, the lewd details of the “dossier” leaking (no pun intended) to include accusations of golden showers, Trump actually called Melania to tell her, incredulous to the point of laughter. “You won’t believe this,” the source tells me he told her. She thought it was funny, too, and the two of them, together, remarked how ridiculous it was.