Even after four years as our first lady, Melania Trump remains an enigma
She expressed sympathy for those who have suffered during the covid-19 pandemic. She pointedly declined to criticize her husband’s opponents, saying she did not want to deepen the nation’s divisions.
And in what might be read as a rebuke to a president who has criticized protesters and defended Confederate monuments, she acknowledged that the time has come for a racial reckoning in this country.
“Like all of you, I have reflected on the racial unrest in our country. It is a harsh reality that we are not proud of parts of our history,” she said. “I’d like to call on the citizens of this country to take a moment, pause and look at things from all perspectives. I urge people to come together in a civil manner so we can work and live up to our standard American ideals.”
This was something of a do-over opportunity for her after the embarrassment of her address to the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland, which it turned out had been partially lifted from the speech that Michelle Obama gave to the Democratic convention in Denver eight years earlier. An aide took the fall for that one.
First lady is a role that comes with no job description, and each woman who has held it has defined it her own way. Some have struggled more than others.
Melania Trump was not exactly eager to take on her new life in Washington. As my Post colleague Mary Jordan revealed in her recent biography of the first lady, “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,” Trump delayed her move to the capital for months after her husband’s 2017 inauguration, in part so that she could gain more leverage in renegotiating the couple’s prenuptial agreement.
A former model, Trump made her most famous fashion statement as first lady by donning a $39 jacket on the return leg of a trip she made to the Texas border to visit detained migrant children. Emblazoned on the back: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” Her spokeswoman first insisted that the baffling choice was simply “just a jacket,” but her husband said it was a message meant for the media.
Public polling about the first lady has been scarce. What data there is indicates she is not as popular as her most recent predecessors, Laura Bush and Obama. Trump’s favorability in a Fox News survey in January was 47 percent; that same poll put Bush’s positive numbers during her husband’s presidency at 68 percent, and Obama’s at 60 percent.
On the other hand, surveys generally find that more people like her than don’t, which makes her more well-regarded than her husband.
She occasionally finds intriguing ways to signal that she is not in accord with him. Early in the pandemic, the first lady posted a tweet urging people to wear masks, along with a photo of herself in one, which was something the president at that point refused to do.
Still, it is easy to make too much of these flickers of character and independence. It should not be forgotten that she joined her husband in questioning Barack Obama’s legitimacy as president by promoting a racist lie that he was not born in the United States.
Her signature cause — the initiative she christened with the syntactically challenged slogan “Be Best” — ranks among its top priorities an effort to combat online bullying. But how is it possible to view her supposed advocacy as anything more than lip service when you see how her husband behaves on a daily and sometimes hourly basis?
After President Trump last year mocked climate activist Greta Thunberg, a teen who has been diagnosed with a disorder that is on the autism spectrum, the first lady’s response was to suggest that Thunberg had asked for it by speaking up on the issue.
So who is she really? The impressions that she allows us are fleeting and contradictory. Which leaves us to make only one conclusion: Melania Trump is a riddle that she doesn’t really want us to solve.
Read more:
