It seems like pretty much every prominent member of the GOP has been trotted out during this year’s Republican National Convention at one point or another, from Ohio senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance—whom Donald Trump announced as his running mate on Monday—to Congressman Matt Gaetz. One notable exception, though, was former first lady Melania Trump, who was conspicuously missing the first three days of the RNC.
Tonight Melania is scheduled to join her husband in Milwaukee as he formally accepts the Republican nomination, but her absence for most of the RNC feels like a continuation of her legacy as first lady. Her predecessors Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush all carved out distinct (if intentionally anodyne) policy areas during their husbands’ time in office; even the fiercest critics of the Bush administration could find little to criticize in Laura’s pro-kids-reading message. But Melania’s impact on the Trump White House was both harder to parse and easier to distill to a series of—for lack of a better term—incredibly weird viral moments, from her questionable campaign against bullying to that infamous “I Really Don’t Care” jacket and her Christmas-decoration fiasco of 2020.
Melania had more reason than usual to stay out of the spotlight this week, given her husband faced an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, but I still find myself wondering—as I inevitably do whenever she enters the news cycle—just what her PR strategy is. At times, the 54-year-old former model appears to be attempting to telegraph a deliberately remote, inaccessible persona, wearing black for both her final appearance as first lady, during President Joe Biden’s inauguration, and her return to the campaign spotlight at the Log Cabin Republicans’ fundraiser in April 2024. And her recent public comments after Trump’s shooting were strange and disjointed enough to spark speculation that they were written by AI. (While a less-than-polished statement is perhaps to be expected in the wake of something as distressing as a spouse’s attempted murder, it is, ironically, difficult to see Melania repeatedly referring to Trump’s “human side” as anything other than robotic.)
It’s been theorized that Melania had little interest in returning to the White House if Trump were reelected in 2024, and now that the couple’s 18-year-old son, Barron, is off to college, there would seem to be less incentive than ever for Melania to help her husband project the kind of happy-family image that has traditionally been required of the first family. If the first lady has long functioned as a kind of watermark against which all other forms of American womanhood are measured (especially among the family-values-minded conservative set), what can we infer from Melania’s absence—not just from the majority of the RNC but also from much of her husband’s campaign in general? (Compare her to, say, Jill Biden.) It’s tempting to interpret Melania’s relatively reduced role in Trump’s reelection effort as evidence of her husband’s fundamental, much-remarked-on misogyny—though the actual logic behind Trump’s campaign decisions is often largely obscure.
Of course, there are plenty of Republican lawmakers’ wives who do step out and take up space. Vance’s wife, Usha, whose debut in Milwaukee was filled with references to her husband as a “tough Marine” and “working-class guy,” is among them. So maybe Melania’s press shyness is her personal preference and not any real indicator of the way her husband’s political set sees the women who raise their children, tend to their homes, and generally perform the often-invisible domestic labor that so often falls along gendered lines. That said, as more and more evidence piles up of a second Trump administration’s threat to abortion rights and other issues that disproportionately affect women, I have to wonder: Is the ideal Republican wife one who’s…simply not around to pass judgment?
