What to make of the role of US first lady? Jacqueline Kennedy once noted that the name “sounds like a saddle horse”. Some would say the job is more suited to a show pony. Yet, even in this regard, Melania Trump has cut an unusual figure. Since her initial reluctance to move to the White House — she spent the first five months of her husband’s presidency in New York — she has emerged as an unlikely figurehead for the anti-Trump resistance.
At the 2017 women’s march in Washington DC, a day after Mr Trump’s inauguration, a handful of protesters carried signs with the first lady’s image and slogans such as “Free Melania” and “Melania: Blink Twice If You Need Help”. Video clips of the new first couple’s interactions were analysed and dissected for proof that Ms Trump was unhappy in her marriage — a forced smile that shifted into a grimace; a hand swatted away as the couple descended the steps from Air Force One. For critics of the president, the image of Ms Trump as a captive princess was irresistible.
Alas, that was a mirage — at least according to two unauthorised biographies of the first lady, the first by veteran Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan, the second by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the New York socialite and Ms Trump’s former friend. Ms Jordan’s The Art of Her Deal, and Ms Winston Wolkoff’s Melania and Me, offer insights into a carefully crafted, if sometimes baffling, exterior. (Remember the Zara jacket emblazoned with the slogan “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” she wore travelling to a detention facility for migrant children?)
The jacket, Ms Winston Wolkoff suggests, spelt out a message from Ms Trump to the media, according to a conversation the writer had with her not long after: she had officially given up on trying to please the press or any of her other critics. “They say I’m complicit, so I work on Christmas stuff. Who gives a fuck about decorations?” she reportedly said. (A spokesperson has dismissed the book as “not truthful”.)
Together, the books reassess preconceived ideas about Ms Trump and her level of agency in the White House and her marriage. It was Ms Trump, for instance, who encouraged her husband to run for president and to pick Mike Pence as his running mate, Ms Jordan writes. She adds that while outsiders saw the delayed move to Washington as proof of a corroding marriage, Ms Trump in fact used the delay as leverage to secure a more generous renegotiation of her prenuptial agreement for herself and her school-aged son.
The authors also note a simmering rivalry between Ms Trump and the president’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, whom the first lady nicknames “princess”, according to both accounts. Ms Winston Wolkoff recalls in detail the elaborate planning that went into the seating arrangement at the inauguration ceremony (which she helped to organise) so that Ms Trump would obscure her stepdaughter from direct view of the cameras.
Not all friends have such access beyond the curtain. “The hologram that she’s created leaves so much unknown that people view her in different ways”, writes Ms Jordan. As one acquaintance confesses to the author: “I don’t even know if she goes to the bathroom.” And insiders are not necessarily admitted forever, as shown by the cautionary tale of Ms Winston Wolkoff, a member of Ms Trump’s staff until she was “thrown under the bus” over inquiries about the inauguration’s cost.
Still, the two accounts are likely to quash any last hopes Trump critics have of his wife as a secret ally. “We learn through these books that she is very much on board with him and his policies,” says Kate Andersen Brower, the author of three books about the White House and a chronicler of first ladies. As far back as 2011, she notes, Ms Trump defended “birtherism”, the conspiracy theory promoted by her husband that former president Barack Obama was not born in the US.
Besides, Ms Trump had already warned them. “People, they don’t really know me, people think and talk about me, like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania’,” she told the television host Anderson Cooper on the eve of the 2016 election. “Don’t feel sorry for me.” On that front it seems, the first lady may finally get her wish.
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Melania Trump mythbusters cast doubt on ‘captive princess’ fantasy - Financial Times
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