by Kate Bennett
She spoke for ten minutes that day, sharing her thoughts about Be Best, whose logo Melania had designed herself, writing the two words in marker in her own handwriting. Admittedly, vast parts of her remarks were awkward because they addressed the importance of being nice and kind online and setting a good example for children—while Trump, who let fly Twitter name-calling on the regular, sat feet from her in the front row. Smiling afterward, he, the giant elephant in the Rose Garden, sat at a small desk and signed a proclamation marking the day Be Best Day, handing Melania the pen when he was done. “I think you all know who’s going to get the pen.”
Asked later how the president felt about his online behavior in the light of his wife’s new platform, press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “I think the idea that you’re trying to blame cyberbullying on the president…,” she said, trailing off. She didn’t really have an answer, in other words.
The strange part of Be Best is that to this day it has no publicly stated framework, timeline, or markers for progress. Melania has done events to promote her platform, but she has mainly done so in conjunction with other government entities that already have programs that dovetail with Melania’s Be Best initiative, like the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. She is still “gathering information,” says Grisham, about whether we can expect policy changes in the future or if Melania is going to seek funding or legislative support from Capitol Hill. She has, however, visited more than fifteen states and nine countries, participating in Be Best–related experiences. But the likelihood that it will ever have the impact of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign or Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No is slim to none.
Melania’s chief concern about Be Best that day was simply that she would be able to make the announcement—her family had tried to convince her to put it off until after she had taken care of her kidney issue. Melania didn’t listen. She felt like the unveiling of Be Best had to get done before she had her surgery; otherwise, it would be lost in the swirl of stories about her health. Also, doctors had warned her that the recovery time could be long, an undetermined period that might be as little as a week or as long as a month, possibly longer still if there were complications.
On Sunday night, May 13, Melania Trump slipped out of the White House and motorcaded the twenty minutes to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, settling into pre-op mode to await her early-morning surgery. She was not accompanied by Trump, who was beside himself with worry and very much wanted to go along. Trump is not good with illness; it stresses him out. While he’s gotten better with visiting wounded or sick military personnel, first responders, and others, because he has to, he was practically crippled by the thought of Melania in pain, in a hospital, undergoing a surgery. He wanted to be with her, but she didn’t want to raise suspicions or incur undue press attention by having him there. He is also not good at a ruse. And sneaking the first lady out of the White House and into a hospital required extreme secrecy.
Melania knew well that if Trump went anywhere, with him would have to come a far more intense security profile, and the protective press pool. There was also always the chance that if he went, he would spill the beans, either directly to the press or to one of his staff, who would turn around and leak it. Melania knew her husband: he wasn’t good at keeping his feelings to himself, and he liked to be the one to announce things. If he were to wait at the hospital during the procedure, she was concerned that in his fit of worry, he would let it slip out. Fiercely determined to undergo her hospital stay exactly the way she wished, Melania wasn’t going to divert from her strategy. That included not alerting the media, or the public, until she was out of surgery.
“This morning, first lady Melania Trump underwent an embolization procedure to treat a benign kidney condition. The procedure was successful, and there were no complications,” said a written statement issued by Grisham that I received under embargo minutes before it was to be released widely. “Mrs. Trump is at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and will likely remain there for the duration of the week. The first lady looks forward to a full recovery so she can continue her work on behalf of children everywhere,” the statement read.
At 5 P.M. that afternoon, Trump tweeted that he was departing the White House to pay his wife a visit. “Heading to Walter Reed Medical Center to see our great First Lady, Melania. Successful procedure, she is in good spirits. Thank you to all the well-wishers!” he wrote. There was a sense of disbelief among the public that Trump hadn’t been present for his wife while she was having surgery. People and pundits were appalled. Certainly, Melania could have, and perhaps should have, corrected the misperception by issuing another statement via Grisham that stated something like, “While the president wanted very much to be by his wife’s side, for the sake of privacy and out of concern for the sensitive nature of the medical procedure, Mrs. Trump requested the president visit when she was out of her procedure.” But Melania wasn’t big on statements about her feelings, and bailing out Trump from a touch of bad press wasn’t high on her list of things to do that day.
That the first lady of the United States had undergone a medical procedure serious enough to warrant a weeklong hospital stay for recovery, without anyone finding out ahead of time, to me was remarkable, and it spoke to the intense loyalty her staff felt toward her. Trump, on the other side of the White House, couldn’t keep a lid on anything—his staff was like a sieve, so frequent were the leaks. But Melania not only suffered a debilitating medical issue for weeks without anyone finding out but also checked into a hospital and had an operation. And not a peep from anyone.
Melania was the first U.S. first lady to undergo such a serious medical procedure while in the White House since Nancy Reagan had a mastectomy in October 1987. Rosalynn Carter underwent surgery to remove a benign lump from her breast in April 1977. Weeks after Betty Ford became first lady, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in September 1974. Melania’s procedure, which is what the White House was calling it, and therefore what the press was instructed to call it, was rare.
“An embolization procedure to treat a benign kidney condition” said a couple of key things, without revealing any details. One, it confirmed embolization, which means there had to be a closing off of blood vessels, commonly done to cut off or stem growth. Two, a benign kidney condition indicated the thing that was embolized was likely a growth of some kind, but it was not malignant. Yet after a couple of days in the hospital, the public was beginning to wonder why she was still there. Medical experts were all over cable news channels speculating that the length of her stay indicated a more complex situation than is normal for what was described, since some patients who undergo embolization are free to leave a medical facility the same day. Not so Melania.
She waited two days after her surgery to tweet about how she was feeling—really, an unheard-of length of time for the first lady of the United States to update the American people about a hospital stay and well-being. “A sincere thank you to Walter Reed Medical Unit @WRBethesda & to all who have sent good wishes & prayers! I am feeling great & look forward to getting back home @WhiteHouse soon,” she tweeted. It did little to shed light on her condition, the procedure, or how long she would really be in the hospital. Grisham was on high alert and would ping me whenever CNN strayed into speculation territory—pointing me back to her initial statement. I understood what she was trying to do, but I also argued it was difficult to have it both ways. Her statement was lean, and it was also days ago, and the job of every journalist was to get the real story of what was happening, and in our lightning-fast news cycle, that meant bringing out any sort of medical expert or historian or reporter or doctor or anyone who could attempt to dig at the story to help it make sense to a curious and anxious public.
By Friday, with Melania still at Walter Reed, the speculation had ballooned into straight-up conspiracy-theory status. I was getting e-mails from colleagues and friends, p
eople I respected and trusted, telling me that they had heard Melania had possibly undergone cosmetic surgery, augmenting her breasts, getting a facelift, or having liposuction—or that she actually did have something more serious, like cancer, and the statement had been a lie.
“I am not going to expand beyond the statement I put out,” Grisham told me on Tuesday, a full day after the procedure, when there was no other information offered to the public or the press. I kept asking why the routine procedure would require a multiday hospital stay. “The first lady is in good spirits and she is resting. There are HIPAA laws to consider, but she also deserves personal privacy,” Grisham shot back.
I am not naïve. And I am a reporter in the Trumpian era of dramatic falsehoods and exaggerations and lies, many from the mouth of the president himself. The thought that something was fishy obviously occurred to me, and those suspicions were influenced and amplified, I will admit, by the Greek chorus of people telling me something wasn’t on the up-and-up.
Again, I went back to my closest Melania sources, over and over again; I hunted every weird and obscure lead. But I kept coming back to the fact that, while Melania might withhold information, while she might be the most opaque first lady in history in terms of being forthcoming, she wasn’t a liar. I also had a source whom I trusted implicitly, who shared with me that Melania’s medical issue was indeed not minor—and that an embolization of a growth of some sort, small or large, when attached to the kidney, as hers might have been, made for a dangerous and complicated operation. In no way was it ever intended to be an outpatient situation. Couple that with the amount of pain she had apparently been in, according to close friends, and how long she had had that pain prior to the surgery, and there was concern that if her recuperation was not careful and extended, her type of condition could possibly result in the loss of her kidney.
I pressed Grisham, and she pressed back. “Every patient is different,” she told me. “The medical professionals who have been giving opinions to the media based on one statement are uninformed. Mrs. Trump has a medical team that is comfortable with her care, which is all that matters. Her recovery and privacy are paramount and I will have no further comment beyond this. Anyone else who chooses to speak with the media will only be speculating.”
On Saturday morning, May 19, six days after she had checked in, Trump welcomed her back by tweeting. “Great to have our incredible First Lady back home in the White House. Melania is feeling and doing really well. Thank you for all of your prayers and best wishes!” he wrote, after initially tweeting and deleting the same message with a typo of his own wife’s name, spelling it “Melanie.”
However, the return home to the White House didn’t put a stop to the speculation about her health or what she may have had “done” (there were still soooo many people who thought she went under the knife for cosmetic purposes), because no one would see Melania in public for weeks. In fact, the last time anyone had laid eyes on her publicly was more than three weeks before, when she accompanied Trump on a middle-of-the-night trip to Andrews Air Force Base to welcome home three American hostages returned from North Korea.
Grisham told me that Melania was fine and that she was working on upcoming events like the Congressional Picnic, scheduled for June, and the annual July Fourth festivities, but still, no public sighting? Not even a glimpse? A tweet with a photo? Couldn’t she just pop out to a school for an hour? Drop off some Be Best supplies or maybe even just host a few kids at the White House garden? How about even a wave of a hello from the Truman Balcony, to make sure the first lady wasn’t, well, pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s? The conspiracy theorists had a field day with each passing hour that Melania didn’t appear in public.
But, like anything else in Melania’s world, she wasn’t going to be forced into faking something—and she wasn’t going to step in front of the cameras just because the media was demanding she do so. In fact, like Trump, she would double down and stay inside even longer, just to shove it in the face of everyone who wanted to make sure the first lady was still the first lady and that she didn’t have a new nose or something. I understood this, but only because I was used to covering her. Everyone else was perplexed. But as fourteen days stretched into twenty, and twenty stretched to twenty-five, I too was wondering where the hell she was.
Finally, Melania did go to an event on June 4 at the White House, honoring more than forty Gold Star families. It was her first public appearance since having a medical procedure for a benign kidney condition on May 14, but, though she tweeted about it, the event was closed to the press.
On June 6, she emerged, more than three weeks since anyone had seen her in public: Melania joined Trump for a trip to FEMA (of all places) to sit in on a meeting about hurricane preparedness. I covered her that day, just as I had broken the news the day before that Melania was finally scheduled to emerge from her recovery. I watched as she silently entered FEMA headquarters in downtown D.C. and sat beside the president at the head of the table, filled with other cabinet members, the vice president, and other officials. It was an odd place for her to reappear. She was wearing a tan trench-coat dress and her signature heels. How did she look? To me? The same. “Of course, we have to start with our great first lady, Melania,” said Trump to the assembled people of the … Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Thank you, Melania. She’s doing great. We’re very proud of her. She’s done a fantastic job as first lady,” he went on, oddly referring to her in the third person, even though she was sitting right next to him. “People love you. The people of our country love you.” Now he was going on too long, rambling a bit. “She went through a little rough patch, but she’s doing great”—back to the third person. The whole minute or so was bizarre.
That morning he had tweeted in defense of Melania: “The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife and our great First Lady, Melania. During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse. All Fake, she is doing really well!”
Two days later, with speculation about her medical procedure still hanging in the air, Trump did what Melania was worried he would do a month before—he spilled the beans. After all that quiet, all of the cloak-and-dagger ops to keep her condition and her medical procedure secret, her own husband played her out. “First lady’s great, right there,” said Trump, who was answering questions from the South Lawn of the White House, en route, alone, to the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Canada. He pointed to the upper windows of the White House, to the residence level. “She wanted to go,” said Trump of his wife, who had been so fiercely private about her health. “Can’t fly for one month, the doctors say,” Trump continued. “She had a big operation, that was close to a four-hour operation. And she’s doing great.” With one quick sentence, Trump had elephant-plodded right into Melania’s orchestrated, tidy, and very private persona—and trampled all over it.
Trump’s statement made her reemergence into the public eye tougher and more complicated. But as with most things, Melania knew she could catch attention again, under her own terms, whenever she wanted to—without ever saying a word.
19
The Fashion
“I wish people would focus on what I do, not what I wear.”
—MELANIA TRUMP
The spring of 2018 had been difficult for Melania Trump, to put it mildly. Part of a difficult year, actually, if you chuck in the stories of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal and the rumors about Russian hookers and lewd sexual exploits, all of which heated up or broke after January 1, 2018.
But Melania had weathered it. Unlike almost every other political spouse before her, she had not gritted her teeth and held her husband’s hand. If anything, she’d hung him out to dry. But mostly she had disappeared, retreating even more deeply than the public had come to expect of her.
It was April 2018, two days before Melania’s forty-eighth birthday, and she wanted to show off a bit, make it clear she was still
there, alive—turn the focus toward herself for once. She thought about what her predecessors had done before her, like Jackie, who, when she wanted to steal the spotlight from Jack, wore something she knew would make headlines—for example, the couple’s first trip abroad to France would never have been as big a sensation had Jackie not been keen enough to wear Givenchy, designed by the master of French couture Hubert de Givenchy. For that trip, Jackie had asked Givenchy to make more than a dozen pieces, but it was the floral embroidered satin gown she wore to a formal dinner at Versailles that sealed her popularity abroad. Afterward, Jackie sent Givenchy a personal note of thanks, adding that the French president Charles de Gaulle, at the dinner, had told her, “Madame, this evening you look like a Parisienne.” “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it,” JFK famously joked, slightly passive-aggressively, in his speech to that nation at the end of the trip.
Jackie and Melania were both loath to continually be written about for what they wore, but they also knew it came in handy when the need presented itself.
So on that April day, Melania wore a hat. A big white hat.
The occasion was her first major hostessing duty as first lady; she and Trump were welcoming Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, the president and first lady of France, to the White House for the first official state visit of the administration. She had been prepping for months. Not just the menu—goat cheese gateau with tomato jam and buttermilk biscuit crumbles, rack of spring lamb with Carolina Gold rice jambalaya, and nectarine tart with crème fraîche ice cream for dessert—but what, precisely, she would wear.
She turned to her stylist, Hervé Pierre, who had proved himself up to the challenge several times before, always nailing what Melania was thinking, as able to interpret her thoughts as well as anyone could. Pierre, who spent fifteen years at the house of iconic designer Carolina Herrera, doesn’t call himself a stylist for Melania, at her insistence, but rather an “adviser,” though his primary role for Melania includes selecting and shopping for wardrobe items, tailoring fit, and offering up accessories. These are all things a personal stylist does, of course, but it’s very Melania to not want to admit she has a stylist, even though she sort of does.