Speculation ramped up this week over whether Melania Trump would become a more visible presence in the 2024 presidential campaign of her husband Donald Trump, after she appeared alongside him to cast her ballot in Florida’s GOP primary.
No one should be surprised that the former first lady offered a typically enigmatic, noncommittal response to reporters’ questions about whether they’d be seeing more of her at campaign events. “Stay tuned,” Melania Trump said.
Of course, it’s been pretty well established by multiple books and news articles that Melania never enjoyed the messy work of politics, Now, a new book about first ladies also suggests that she may not have been the most industrious person to ever hold that job.
US First Lady Melania Trump tours the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, Egypt, October 6, 2018, the final stop on her 4-country tour through Africa. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
While one of the most popular people in Trump’s orbit, Melania did not enjoy receiving requests to make appearances on behalf of his political agenda when he was president, according to “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,” by Katie Rogers, a New York Times White House correspondent.
Melania also “avoided being overscheduled, and at times avoided being scheduled at all,” Rogers also said. Her staff could sometimes convince her to do multiple events on days when they knew she could be “camera ready, with a full designer ensemble, dewy makeup, and a pristine blowout.” But they only were successful about “half the time,” Rogers said.
So what did Melania Trump do with her time while serving as America’s first lady?
According to Rogers’ book, and her interview this week with Puck political reporter Tara Palmeri for the “Somebody’s Gotta Win” podcast, Melania Trump sometimes spent “all day” in her bathrobe in the White House residence. Rogers said in her book that Melania especially took “to wearing elegant robes” in the residence “at all hours” in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic set in. (Maybe Melania Trump was giving into the very casual fashion choices made by a lot of house-bound Americans during COVID lockdowns.) In the interview, Rogers added that she heard from Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary and the first lady’s former aide, that she got her “love of robes from Melania because she was constantly wearing them, more and more.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump make their way across the South Lawn of the White House after returning on Marine One from their surprise trip to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq to visit troops, on December 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Pete Marovich – Pool/Getty Images)
According to what Grisham told Rogers, Melania Trump preferred plush, terry-cloth robes. This preference probably shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the former model’s love of spa treatments at her husband’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Melania Trump might wear one of her robes while visiting her husband’s bedroom at night and listening in on his phone calls with advisers, Rogers reported. Melania, by the way, had her own suite in the White House — separate from her husband’s. During that time, Melania also busied herself by “assembling photo albums of her aesthetic contributions to the White House,” Rogers reported
Whether in a robe or not, Melania also spent some of her time as first lady meeting with lawyers to examine her assets and to go over matters related to her pre- and postnuptial agreements with her husband, who said he became a billionaire as a real estate developer and reality TV star, according to Rogers book. Above all, Melania wanted to protect the trust fund of her son, Barron, and make sure he would be on equal financial footing with his four older half-siblings.
Previous biographies of Melania Trump have said that it was clear that she would never be a conventional first lady, if there ever was one. From the start, Melania resisted joining Trump in Washington, D.C., after his January 2017 inauguration, instead returning to New York City where their son, then 10, had to finish out his school year.
Pope Francis (C) walks past US First Lady Melania Trump (R) and the daughter of US President Donald Trump Ivanka Trump (L) at the end of a private audience at the Vatican on May 24, 2017. (ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images)
But while in New York City, Melania wasn’t happy to learn about the machinations of her stepdaughter, Ivanka Trump. Rogers reported that Ivanka initially considered transforming the East Wing, the traditional base of operations for first ladies, into a suite of offices for herself and other members of the Trump family. Her father also had an early idea that she would help Melania carry out some first lady functions. But that idea dissipated after Trump gave his daughter a West Wing job as a senior adviser. But thereafter, Melania would still spend some of her time as first lady engaged in a power struggle with Ivanka, Rogers wrote. Melania would even refer to Ivanka as “the princess” so frequently that a coterie of her aides adopted the nickname.
But as much as Melania once felt protective of the East Wing, she barely stepped foot in its offices once she moved to Washington, according to Rogers. As first lady, she only visited it a handful of times. Instead, she preferred to spend much of her time in the residence, “where she would occasionally summon members of her staff to update her on the day’s gossip and would shake her head at the infighting taking place on the floors below,” Rogers wrote.
The only way Melania had an impact on the East Wing was to transform unused office space into a “swag room,” a place to store and gift-wrap packages of White House-themed dishes, leather desk sets, salt-and-pepper shakers and other memorabilia to hand out to friends and Trump allies. In the interview with Palmeri, Rogers said that Melania’s East Wing “swag room” reminded her of the gift-wrap room that Candy Spelling, the wife of Hollywood TV mogul Aaron Spelling, once had in their palatial, $150 million mansion in Los Angeles.
Rogers wrote that Melania accomplished a few things as first lady. She was credited in 2018 with convincing her husband to issue an executive order, which stopped his administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the southwestern border of the United States.
JOINT BASE ANDREWS – JUNE 21: U.S. first lady Melania Trump boards an Air Force plane before traveling to Texas to visit facilities that house and care for children taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border June 21, 2018 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. The first lady is traveling to Texas to see first hand the condition and treatment that children taken from their families at the border were receiving from the federal government. Following public outcry and criticism from members of his own party, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to stop the separation of migrant children from their families, a practice the administration employed to deter illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But Melania undermined any public good will she received on this issue when she chose to wear the infamous ” I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket on her way to visit detained migrant children in Texas. When Melania was asked why she did something “so unbecoming of her office,” she joined her husband in saying that the message on the jacket was directed at the “left-wing media who are criticizing me.” However, another popular theory is that Melania wanted to send a message to Ivanka, due to their ongoing competition for positive press coverage.
Like all first ladies, Melania launched an initiative to supposedly improve the lives of a certain segment of the American public. Melania’s Be Best initiative was supposed to promote childhood well-being and to curb bullying. But Rogers cited Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Melania’s former aide and good friend — with whom she had a famous falling out — as saying that Be Best didn’t amount too much more than a few public appearances and “a pamphlet.”
US First Lady Melania Trump walks through Christmas decorations in the East Wing as she tours holiday decorations at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 27, 2017. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Rogers wrote that Melania’s “most lasting contributions” as first lady had do with overseeing upgrades to White House facilities and features that most Americans would never see in person. These projects included a redesign of the Rose Garden and an upgrade to the White House tennis pavilion. Both efforts, though, were met with criticism, as were Melania’s choices for the annual holiday decorations.
“As time went by, Melania’s sporadic efforts” to be a traditional first lady “lost steam, undermined by her husband’s public spectacles as well as her own self-inflicted public relations disasters and the hostility she felt from the news media,” Rogers wrote.
By the end of her time as first lady, Melania Trump was “checked out” and “could not be relied upon to do the bare minimum,” Rogers wrote. That includes on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of pro-Trump supporters launched a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol to stop certification of the 2020 election. Melania Trump had been busy that day having photos of a rug taken for a book she wanted to publish on White House decor, Rogers said. When Grisham asked Melania if she wanted to issue a statement, to encourage the rioters to stand down, Melania tersely replied, “no.”