While First Lady Melania Trump has profited from her office — whether by releasing a documentary about her life or dumping a self-named memecoin onto the crypto market — she has been conspicuous in her absence from President Donald Trump’s White House. Now a journalist who specializes in covering the Trumps explains why.
“It took six months, in Trump’s first term, for his wife to relocate from New York to Washington D.C. — and then, even with separate bedrooms in the White House, she was hardly there,” journalist Michael Wolff wrote on his Substack on Monday. “Their son, Barron, was virtually never there. Rather, they “often stayed with,” in White House parlance, her parents in a house in Maryland. Likewise, at Mar-a-Lago, Melania and Barron’s move was actually into a Palm Beach house with her parents — rather than into the country club quarters.”
Wolff added, “During the two active years of the 2024 campaign, her only appearances included the Republican Convention, during the days after the attempt on her husband’s life, when she refused to sit next to him, and one event during the final week of the campaign. She refused to attend any of the myriad courtroom appearances related to his four criminal indictments. She published a best-selling book shortly before the election, in which her husband was, at best, a peripheral character — a book neither Trump nor his campaign team saw much before publication.”
Ultimately, Wolff wrote that “by the end of the campaign, aides, when queried, were actively seeking new language for the situation: ‘She’ll be more like a part-time First Lady.””
The writer continued that Melania Trump has appeared to have never spent a single night at the White House during Trump’s second term, even though she has profited off of being First Lady during that same period to the reported tune of $17 million. When Wolff asked one close Trump aide why she behaved like this, the aide responded that “she hates his f—— guts.”
Wolff elaborated on the odd nature of the arrangement between the President and First Lady.
“It’s a new kind of pretend, a particular Trump-style pretend,” Wolff wrote. “You pretend so little, and make such a limited effort at it, that everybody knows you’re pretending. Therefore you’re not really pretending. This is a sham marriage, a cynical arrangement, a business deal, or, even an extortive situation, and the American people have a right to know. The only problem with that is they do know.”
In fact, Trump’s mysterious interactions with staffer Natalie Harp — who reportedly leaves him adoring letters, is invited into his private spaces and rarely leaves his side — can be attributed to his distant relationship with the actual First Lady.
“Trump doesn’t have a wife around him,” The Daily Beast journalist David Rothkopf said on Sunday. “He doesn’t have kids around him. I don’t think he likes his kids — he certainly didn’t go to Don Jr.’s wedding. People beyond, like, one degree of separation can’t be trusted. He’s paranoid.”