Days after the once and future president beat Vice President Kamala Harris in November, reports emerged that Melania Trump would break from recent political tradition and spend the majority of her time as the next first lady in New York City, where their son Barron is a freshman at New York University.
Melania Trump has not publicly confirmed her plans, but after being selective with her campaign trail appearances last year, she has been seen more during her husband’s transition, granting her first postelection interview and hosting the former Japanese prime minister’s wife at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Despite her uptick in appearances, journalist and author of First Women Kate Andersen Brower predicted Melania Trump would play a smaller part in her husband’s administration than her immediate predecessor, Jill Biden, who broke with tradition by becoming the first first lady to continue working professionally, in her case, as a part-time community college English and writing instructor.
“If past is prologue, then we’ll have a first lady who is less active than Dr. Biden,” Brower told the Washington Examiner of Melania Trump. “I think it’s important, however, that we look at first ladies as individuals and respect that each woman, from Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the first truly activist first lady, to Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, who prioritized their roles as mothers in the White House, figure it out on their own.”
Brower underscored that there is “no job description, no pay, and endless expectations” for first ladies. Melania Trump first caused controversy during the president-elect’s first administration when she and Barron, who was 11 years old at the time, did not move to Washington, D.C., until after the end of the 2016-2017 school year and negotiations over a new prenuptial agreement between her and her husband.
“A lot depends on what stage of their lives they’re in,” Brower said of first ladies. “I thought that Barron being in college would mean greater flexibility for Melania, but it also strikes me that she’s someone who doesn’t like Washington and who is used to determining her own schedule.”
Historian Andrew Och disagreed, arguing Melania Trump has suggested in her initial interviews that she is excited at the prospect of being first lady again, especially because of her pro-children policies, including her “Be Best” program, adding that first ladies have been politically important in the past because they tend to be more popular than their husbands and can help them improve their public images.
“Melania Trump, when she was first lady, kind of did her own thing,” Och told the Washington Examiner. “She doesn’t care whether the public likes her or not. She’d just go out and do her own thing to a certain degree, and she did more than most people thought she would.”
Melania Trump was a political enigma during her husband’s first administration, during which some of his critics projected their sympathies onto her. There were, for example, “Free Melania” memes that were prompted by her facial expressions during Trump’s first inauguration and persisted because of the alleged extramarital affair with pornography star Stormy Daniels. But she has also been criticized, specifically regarding her decision to wear a $39 Zara jacket with the words “I really don’t care” screen printed on the back during a 2018 trip to a migrant children’s shelter in Texas. The second foreign-born first lady, a former fashion model who never graced the cover of Vogue during her husband’s first term, Melania Trump has remained adamant that the jacket was a message to the news media and not about immigrants. She has also supported her husband’s claims to have been cheated out of the 2020 election.
“The public interest starts with social media,” Och said. “Michelle Obama and Melania Trump are the two social media first ladies. They emerged when social media really caught fire. The last first lady that [was liked], no matter what you thought about her husband, and there were very, very strong opinions in both directions [about] George W. Bush, but everyone loves Laura.”
Regardless of Melania Trump’s approach, David Pietrusza, another presidential historian, contended it is not uncommon for first ladies not to have public-facing roles in their husbands’ administrations.
One of the best examples is Harry Truman’s wife, Bess Truman, who “simply despised Washington,” according to Pietrusza.
Bess Truman “was hardly a public figure in any real sense,” Pietrusza told the Washington Examiner. “Bess’s hatred manifested itself, as historian David McCullough noted, in ‘an expression that looked as if her feet hurt.’”
Pietrusza also named a number of former first ladies who experienced health problems or personal tragedies, such as Franklin Pierce’s wife, Jane Pierce, who became “severely withdrawn” after their last surviving son died in a train accident two months before his inauguration.
“William McKinley’s wife, Ida Saxton McKinley, suffered from seizures, and this hampered her public life significantly,” Pietrusza said. “William Howard Taft’s ambitious wife, Helen Taft, suffered a stroke and similarly became incapacitated.”
“While Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, wielded great power, particularly after her husband’s stroke, his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, became seriously ill from Bright’s disease and died in 1914,” the historian added. “Warren Harding’s wife, Florence Kling DeWolfe Harding, similarly suffered from Bright’s disease and spent a good deal of her White House tenure in poor health and bedridden, though she ultimately survived her husband.”
With a couple of weeks until the inauguration, Melania Trump described herself in her first postelection interview as being “very, very busy” with her office and transition team, in addition to “organizing the residence and packing,” but she said the process has been less “challenging” than it was in 2016, when Barack Obama and Michelle Obama did not provide her with “much access” to the White House.
“I know what you need to establish, you know what kind of people you need to hire that, to be in your office, so that’s what I’m doing now,” she told Fox News. “I’m interviewing people for my office. I’m establishing everything that it needs, so we could start on Day One, everybody is in, and we start working.”
The transition team also depended on Melania Trump to announce that she and the president-elect had dinner with the widow of assassinated former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Akie Abe, last month. The president-elect and the late Abe had a close relationship during his first administration.
“It was a privilege to host Mrs. Akie Abe at Mar-a-Lago once again,” Melania Trump wrote on X in a post that was shared by the transition. “We fondly remembered her late husband, former Prime Minister Abe, and honored his remarkable legacy.”
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The president-elect, too, appears to be aware of his wife’s popularity, praising her and the rest of his team in an interview during his visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
“I have a great partner right over here, our first lady. People love our first lady, and we’re going to do something very special,” he told CNBC.
