Thank God for Melania Trump

The museum in Buenos Aires telling the story of Eva Perón, the former first lady of Argentina, is festooned with banners supplying the year of her birth, 1919, but not of her death. In case the visitor misses the point, the word “immortal” appears in Spanish beneath her smiling face. Inside, exhibits recount Perón’s role in fortifying the populist politics of her husband, Juan Perón, enabling his authoritarianism, disdain for judicial and journalistic independence and yen for state capitalism. She formed a bond so strong with Argentina’s common folk that when she died at just 33—for die she did, of cancer, in 1952—millions thronged to glimpse her corpse. Flowers sold out, one plaque says, not just in Argentina but in neighbouring countries.

An American visitor to the Museo Evita might emerge with competing emotions: astonishment at Eva Perón’s enduring effect on Argentina, and gratitude for Melania Trump. Who knows how far Donald Trump might have gone with an Evita by his side? Steely, guarded and extravagantly ornamented, Mrs Trump has always seemed more naturally at home in a Trump tower than at a Trump rally—a better fit, in other words, for his aspirational commercial brand than his relatable political one. She has seldom even appeared at rallies.

The closest the new documentary “Melania” comes to a revelation is a scene in which, worried about safety, Mrs Trump repeatedly objects to the traditional First Couple routine of stepping out of the presidential limousine to walk a bit during the inaugural parade (in the end, citing the cold, Mr Trump moved the celebration inside). By contrast, Evita once brushed aside an associate trying to block a supplicant with a syphilitic sore on her mouth, then kissed the poor woman on the lips.

That is a high bar even for a populist, let alone a former fashion model. But consider the lengths wives of more conventional presidents have gone not just to soften their husbands’ images but to support their priorities—think Laura Bush on education or Hillary Clinton on health care. When Mrs Trump has shown interest in policy, her priorities have been at a remove from those of her husband, if not at odds with them. “I had anticipated some criticism in light of Donald’s social media behaviour,” she acknowledged in 2024 in a memoir, insistently branded “Melania”, as she described taking up the cause of cyberbullying (opposing it, that is).

Mrs Trump makes clear in the book that she supports a right to abortion, another matter on which she must either have had little influence or chosen not to exercise what influence she had. Of the attack on the Capitol by her husband’s supporters on January 6th 2021 she writes: “The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable.” (She failed to denounce the violence as it was raging, she explains, because “I wasn’t aware of the events.”) Mrs Trump is the first naturalised immigrant to serve as First Lady, which may also create ground for profound—and if so also poignantly irrelevant—policy disagreement. “No matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity,” she says in one of the documentary’s many platitudes, albeit one that packs a punch, since the president has called some immigrants “garbage”.

She and Mr Trump clearly align in shared grievance over how they were treated during and after his first term. In her memoir Mrs Trump writes about having her bank account terminated and various business ventures cancelled, including an unspecified “media initiative”, because, she suspects, of “biases related to my last name and political affiliation”. It would take a righteous Trump indeed not to relish how titans of business now grovel before the family, and it seems there are no such Trumps. Eric Trump, the president’s second son, took a half-billion dollar investment in the family’s cryptocurrency venture from an Abu Dhabi royal, the Wall Street Journal reported on January 31st. The United Arab Emirates was subsequently granted access to America’s most advanced artificial-intelligence chips.

Mrs Trump has accomplished a greater feat of Trumpian self-dealing. No secure technology had to change hands. Indeed, in allowing a filmmaker access in the days leading up to the inauguration last year, Mrs Trump succeeded in providing almost nothing of any interest whatsoever. Yet the documentary was (s)lavishly financed by Amazon, which, again according to the Journal, offered close to three times more than any other bidder, $40m, after she pitched the idea to Jeff Bezos over dinner. Mrs Trump reportedly kept at least $28m as a fee, along with editorial control. Amazon is now spending $35m to promote the advertisement it paid Mrs Trump to make about herself. Even the purveyor of Trump Steaks himself never managed a deal so slick. (One wonders, in fact, if the president’s new $10bn lawsuit against the government he runs, over his leaked tax return, is meant to regain the lead in some twisted family contest.)

Mrs Trump, who at 55 is 24 years younger than her husband, has done more than her predecessors as First Lady to assert personal if not political independence. Since Martha Washington compared herself to a state prisoner, First Ladies have struggled with feeling trapped. But Mrs Trump has lived away from the White House much of the time and vanished from public view for long stretches. Despite her husband’s riches, financial independence matters to her, too; she calls it “a core value” in her memoir. At least, with her grift, she is building her own brand more than his, and building it around a deception that is relatively harmless: that she has exceptional taste, not a vision for America. Pat Nixon called being First Lady “the hardest unpaid job in the world”. In those two respects, if only those, Melania Trump is living up to her vainglorious film’s claim that she is reinventing the role. ■