Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  Vogue’s iconic September issue featured Stormy Daniels in 2018. She was dressed in a navy fitted Zac Posen gown, given full hair and makeup treatment, and photographed by the one and only Annie Leibovitz. That Wintour put the porn star in the pages of her magazine before the first lady pretty much sealed the deal. Not only would she not be guaranteed a cover, she would have to follow Stormy.

  Months after the Africa trip, Wintour seemed unable to let her deep distaste of Melania go. She publicly said in an interview that she, as the overlord of Vogue, preferred to use its pages for women whom she felt met her own definition of strong. In other words, Democrats. Kamala Harris had a spread, and so did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Amy Klobuchar; Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand had already been in Vogue’s pages. “You have to stand up for what you believe in and you have to take a point of view,” Wintour said about her choices, which translates to, “If you don’t agree with me, you don’t get in.” Not exactly a democratic way to run a magazine, but Wintour has never been known for running her empire like a democracy. Wintour never mentioned Melania by name in the interview about her “rules” for getting ink, but the message was clear, as Melania remains the only sitting first lady not to have a Vogue cover in over a decade. “We profile women in the magazine that we believe in the stand that they’re taking on issues. We support them in the fact that we feel they are leaders. Particularly after the defeat of Secretary Clinton in 2016, we believe that women should have a leadership position and we intend to support them,” said Wintour. It was so clearly pointed at Melania that Grisham, her spokeswoman, shot back a response: “To be on the cover of Vogue doesn’t define Mrs. Trump, she’s been there, done that long before she was first lady,” a reference to the 2005 wedding cover. “Her role as first lady of the United States and all that she does is much more important than some superficial photo shoot and cover.” Grisham kept going—calling the queen of fashion a couple of names, for good measure. “This just further demonstrates how biased the fashion magazine industry is, and shows how insecure and small-minded Anna Wintour really is. Unfortunately, Mrs. Trump is used to this kind of divisive behavior.”

  So with that hat, the white outfit in Africa, that backdrop, that pensive face in the Land Rover, Melania was also showing Wintour what she had missed. She was art directing, styling and posing for the spread that would never be, and doing so in a way that would make Wintour lust for what could have been.

  I shared my theory with my fellow journalists on the trip, a small and talented crew that included Katie Rogers of The New York Times, another frequent chronicler of Melania Trump. I’m not sure if anyone bought what I was saying then, but by the time we landed in Egypt the following day and Melania got off the plane in wide-leg trousers, cream blazer, and black necktie, it became more feasible. I also thought it notable that she was wearing a menswear-inspired look in a country with a not-stellar track record on women’s rights. Again, there are no coincidences when it comes to Melania Trump and her clothes.

  And, oh, the memes. There were dozens and dozens—the most popular mocked her look, spawning all sorts of “Who Wore It Best?” tweets comparing her to Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders or Michael Jackson in the “Smooth Criminal” video or the villain from Raiders of the Lost Ark—even Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. (I for one thought immediately of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.)

  As she closed out her Africa trip that day in a face-to-face meeting with the Great Sphinx of Giza, one of the most mysterious symbols in the world, she may very well have been mapping the backstory of the Vogue cover feature that wasn’t to be—the “Slovenian Sphinx,” as The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd has dubbed her. It was a fitting end to the weeklong journey to Ghana, Malawi, Kenya, and Egypt for Melania.

  The visit to Africa did little to quell the ongoing who-is-she, who-is-she-not debate, but it did provide an opportunity for Melania’s debut impromptu press conference in Egypt with the group of seven reporters who crisscrossed the continent with her throughout the trip. She talked to us about the Brett Kavanaugh debate raging back home—a story line that had all but usurped any chance of her Africa trip’s making a substantial dent in the airwaves. (I should know: most of my scheduled TV hits for CNN were pushed to make room for Kavanaugh bits; I was relegated to a handful of phoners from the road.) She agreed with Trump that Kavanaugh was “highly qualified” for the Supreme Court justice job, but she was also “glad” that his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, was heard. The answer was classic Melania—she didn’t take a stand either way, and in giving a middle-of-the-road response, she did enough to prevent headlines stating that she broke from her husband’s thinking, while still managing to show a more liberal angle. And she discussed her thoughts on her husband’s Twitter habits (“I don’t always agree with what he tweets, and I tell him that. Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t”); the #MeToo movement (“We need to help all the victims, no matter what kind of abuse they had”); whether she had purposefully visited a continent her husband had reportedly referred to as home to “shithole” countries (“I never heard him saying those comments and that was anonymous source and I would leave it at that”); and if she felt that Trump’s administration had too drastically chopped the budget of USAID, the government entity with which she had partnered for her Africa trip (“I saw successful programs that USAID is providing to the countries, and we are helping them on the journey to self-reliance”). It was Melania’s first-ever off-the-record press “gaggle,” as we call these quick, unplanned scrums with a principal, and she was prepared, even seemed to me more relaxed than she had with press in the past.

  When it was my turn to toss a question, I asked her about the previous day’s scandal of cultural insensitivity, what she thought of the drama caused by her wearing that pith helmet in Kenya—and she snapped at me. In her Ralph Lauren cream slacks and jacket, draped on her shoulders, her white Chanel blouse and tie, her Chanel ballet flats, and, yes, her ivory Chanel fedora, with its black band and signature fabric camellia, Melania trained her steely blue eyes on me and hissed, “You know what? We just completed an amazing trip. We went to Ghana. We went to Malawi. We went to Kenya. Now here we are in Egypt. I want to talk about my trip and not what I wear.”

  It was the peak of irony.

  I understood what she was saying, of course; there is an inherent and deeply unfair bias about clothes that men never have to face, but at the same time she is Melania Trump. It is unavoidable, part of the turf. And, quite frankly, what she wears and how she wears it to draw attention is in her wheelhouse.

  Just minutes after she answered me, Melania walked like a runway model back and forth across the panoramic vistas of the Great Pyramids, photographers clicking away. Though maybe not for Vogue, she was posing for us, for someone, somewhere, perhaps all the editors who had ignored her, who hadn’t put her on the cover of their periodicals, who didn’t climb over themselves to plaster a newsstand with her face. Dramatic instrumental music played loudly from speakers on a nearby stage on which a dance troupe performed whom no one was watching—because all eyes were on Melania Trump, alone.

  20

  The Melania Effect

  “It’s called ‘Melania.’”

  —DONALD TRUMP, ON THE NEW-ERA FIRST LADY

  It would be months into her tenure as first lady before the world witnessed a break in Melania’s unsmiling facade. She was thought to be a robot, a Stepford wife, devoid of feeling. So when she flared, it made headlines.

  Donald Trump had done it again. Pushed her out of the shot. Forgotten she was there. It was supposed to have been a four-person photo op—simple, something a monkey could do. But as was often the case, Trump forgot about his wife, and by the time he remembered she was there, it was too late.

  The walk on the red carpet at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, in May 2017 wasn’t more than one hundred yards. One carpeted section led from the steps of Air Force One to a podium on the tarmac, where Trump was t
o give brief remarks at a formal welcoming ceremony, having just touched down in the second country of his first major international trip as president. Another identical carpeted path led from the podium to the edge of the tarmac and a cordoned-off audience area lined three deep with photographers and news cameras, plus two rows of seated dignitaries they would walk over to meet.

  The movements were fairly simple: they’d gone over them with the White House protocol team and been reminded of the choreography before departing the plane. After remarks, the two couples, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, and the Trumps, would walk side by side in a show of solidarity, both literal and figurative, on the second carpeted portion, away from the podium. Then the Trumps would shake hands with the VIPs and subtly peel off, hopping into the Beast, the president’s armored limo, and then move on to the other random diplomatic stops they had to do. But dammit if he couldn’t get right just one rehearsed fifteen-step walk.

  As the foursome made its way toward the cameras, already not in sync, the Netanyahus holding hands, the Trumps not, Melania fell behind, sort of spilling off to the side of the carpet. Wearing a bright white Michael Kors Collection skirt suit, picked especially to honor the white in the Israeli flag, as well as the symbol of peace, Melania dropped behind, the five-foot-wide swath of red carpet not quite big enough for Trump’s girth and his penchant for easy distraction. Thus Melania lagged, unable to fit next to the other three, awkwardly relegated to unintended submissive “walk behind the man” positioning. And she didn’t like it.

  There’s a split second, maybe two, before Trump, as he often does after that approximate amount of time, remembers his wife is actually there and that he’s supposed to walk next to her, be aware of her, hold her hand. Trump’s synapses fire in a pretty obvious real-time way when you watch the moment on video playback. Suddenly, he realizes he has forgotten something, like his keys going out the door. With hardly a turn of his head, he absently reaches back with his left arm, bending his hand at the wrist, a glance over his shoulder that doesn’t even do the courtesy of meeting her eyes. Melania isn’t having it and—with a swat, as fast as lightning—she bats his hand away and turns her head.

  Trump had made the “leaving her behind” mistake several times before, and would continue to do so, in a variety of iterations, throughout the course of the first half of his presidency. While one could have a field day speculating what it means about the state of his marriage to Melania, a virtually futile exercise regarding any married couple since every marriage is different, it was for the public a rare peek behind Melania’s veil.

  Perhaps Trump’s most notable “forgot her” episode happened almost immediately in his tenure as president, right off the bat, on Inauguration Day. Trump and Melania had pulled up to the north side of the White House in their black Secret Service Suburban to greet Barack and Michelle Obama on the front steps. It was a traditional moment, time-honored, between the outgoing president and the incoming; a “welcome to the house, here are the keys” gesture of goodwill between old and new, this one bound to be especially dissected after such a brutal campaign.

  Trump was just hours from being sworn in as president when he got out of the back seat on the side of the vehicle closest to the front door of the White House. Melania got out of the back seat on the driver’s side, facing Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet by the time Trump had made it up four of the steps on the stairs to clasp hands with Obama, Melania had barely rounded the rear bumper. When Trump was awkwardly cheek-kissing Michelle Obama, Melania was finally standing on the porch with the rest of them, having hustled to catch up, and likely unaware that behavior she was so used to would be humiliatingly called out over and over again in the days and weeks to come as a curious public analyzed the first couple’s marriage.

  “He just … left her,” an incredulous Greek chorus of Americans would say to one another around the proverbial water coolers the next day. “Can you believe it?” “I would kill my husband if he did that!” “Barack would never have done that to Michelle!”

  Standing on the front steps of their new and profoundly unfamiliar home, holding a blue Tiffany gift box, wearing her matching Tiffany-blue suit and gloves, abandoned by the man she was expected to stand beside with honor and respect for him as he leads the country, Melania seethed. Trump had put his third wife in second-thought status too many times to count before, yet it was in that moment that it must have become clear to Melania the title of president of the United States probably wasn’t going to change anything about his boorish behavior. It certainly wasn’t going to change whether he got the door for her or waited for her to catch up to him so the two could walk alongside each other.

  Exceedingly independent and very clear about how and why she moves through life, Melania was not experiencing that car-to-greeting series as the bone-chilling disappointment that the rest of the world was. She was angry he had done it so publicly. In her previous life as “model wife of Donald Trump,” she didn’t freak out when her husband neglected to participate in the chivalry expected of most men of his age and status. “Why change him?” had been Melania’s mantra for the nineteen years she had known Trump. This wasn’t a man who had wooed her with roses and poetry.

  Because, for the most part, Melania didn’t mind the slights; they had become a regular part of the marriage. It was more that now everyone else would see the behavior she grew to recognize, accept, live with, and ignore.

  As perhaps the most technically unqualified modern first lady in recent history, Melania had none of the experience to strategize a defense about how to handle the public scrutiny of her marriage. So insular was her life in New York that, while she knew she would be a global fascination, she didn’t really have a buffer to protect her when she entered Washington. She barely had a team, and she had basically zero in the way of public sympathy at that point to help her combat the force of nature that was her husband. She just had herself. Her introduction to being first lady was lonely and bizarre.

  So, she swatted.

  The hand swat was the first time Melania Trump really got noticed. She had been first lady for just four months; she hadn’t even moved into the White House full-time yet. Up until then, the biggest headlines about her were all will-she, won’t-she speculation about whether she would fulfill her promise to move to Washington after Barron’s school year in New York ended. But with that one emotional swatting-away gesture, the perception of Melania shifted from stone-faced trophy wife cum first lady to human with feelings—or, more likely, “Human? With feelings?!”

  As such, the Israel incident put her on the map in a new way, spawning endless stories on cable news and digital front pages with exclamatory headlines like “Melania Trump Hates Holding Donald’s Hand” (a story by Huffington Post with an accompanying video of the moment that a year later had nine hundred thousand views). A Newsweek headline asked, “Did Melania Trump Smack Donald’s Hand at Israeli Airport?” And while every intern at every news organization across the globe was tasked with finding other moments when the couple did or didn’t clasp fingers, Melania, virtually nonplussed considering it all, sat back and watched her stock rise.

  Google searches for “Melania Trump” and “Melania” had two notable spikes in 2017. The first was Inauguration Day; the second accrued over the course of a couple of days in May, picking up steam on May 22 (or, swatting day) and peaking on May 24, as the story reached fever pitch.

  Grisham never responded to press requests about the incident, nor did she comment on what exactly went down on that red carpet, which smartly left it up to observers to draw their own conclusion—a brilliant strategy and one Grisham would employ countless times in the months to come and which she may very well use now as the president’s spokesperson, filling Sarah Sanders’s shoes as press secretary. The bottom line for Melania’s communications apparatus is “don’t tell everyone everything.” She has learned that keeping quiet usually ends up just fine in the end, as it did with the hand swat
.

  Red-meat conservatives simply chalked the tarmac dustup to the media’s overzealous scrutiny of all things Trump. “Oh, now they’re attacking their marriage!” was the battle cry. And liberals could point to it and say, “See? Even his wife hates him.” Melania didn’t care either way. Neither theory was necessarily true or untrue. The focus in general was ridiculous, she thought. She was never big on public displays of affection, which didn’t essentially have all that much to do with Trump; it was just how she was. Years on the New York social circuit meant that Melania was an air-kiss expert, but gooey hand-holding with her husband? That she was happy to leave to the Obamas.

  In all fairness, however, she would interlock pinkies with her husband literally seconds after the hand swat and fully grab his famously short fingers many other times throughout that same day and throughout the entire trip. Her temper flares were scary, but they were also infrequent and usually quite brief. Also, when the swat occurred, it’s important to bear in mind they had just touched down in a country rife with Orthodox tradition, and Melania in her new role had studied the protocol. She had prepared extensively for this, her first big bow on the international stage, and getting off on the wrong foot in a country as important to her husband’s administration as Israel was not in her playbook. Still, he wasn’t supposed to forget that she was right next to him.

  The following year, next to another first couple, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron of France, Melania would again make headlines for pushing her husband’s hand away, this time during a choreographed and rehearsed official state arrival ceremony on the South Lawn. In that instance, Trump reached for her hand almost too much, blindly trying to find her fingers while simultaneously paying attention to the audience in front of him. She kept trying to close her hand, signaling no, not now, don’t do this now. But Trump would ultimately grab her fingers and hold tight, then nod his head toward hers as if to say, “Phew, thank you!”