Melania Trump: the second coming of the first lady

As Donald Trump starts naming his team for his second term one position is already filled – first lady.

Melania Trump proved a colourful first lady last time round and the early signs are that she will be no less discussed during the second term. "Melania does what Melania wants", Mary Jordan, author of a book about Melania, told Axios, because "her view" is that her role is "unelected" and "not paid".

What happened last time?

By the time the Trumps left the White House in 2021, Melania was the least popular first lady yet, according to surveys by CNN, SRSS and Gallup.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

She was absent from Washington for large chunks of her husband's reign amid conjecture that her stepdaughter Ivanka held the de facto position. So this time round "with her son at university in New York" and Ivanka "off the political scene", it "may feel like her first run at first lady", said The Times.

Will she live in the White House?

Speculation is already rife over whether she will live in the White House, but the prospect of her "rolling in" for a second full-time stint in the East Wing, is "doubtful" according to several "Melania-ologists" on Axios. "I mean, she clearly hated being in Washington," Kate Andersen Brower, an author who specialises in the White House and first ladies, told the outlet.

A source disclosed to People that although Melania will have a "private living apartment" at the White House she also has homes in New York and at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, and "she will spend time in all of these places". It is "not likely" she will make the White House her main residence.

Will she weigh in on policy?

Melania's profile on the White House archive says she spent "much of her time" during Trump's first term "meeting with children all over the world – in classrooms, hospitals, care facilities, at home in the White House, and in communities worldwide".

These trips are thought to have influenced her formation of the Be Best campaign, which focused on well-being for youth and advocating against cyberbullying, and there's a "consensus", said Axios, that Melania will "revisit" this campaign.

But this time she will insist on a larger, "better," and "more qualified" team because "having seen how this works, she would just be wiser and she would be more vocal and more demanding about what the first lady's office should get", said Jordan.

She has also spoken out about a far more divisive issue: abortion and in her recently published memoir she actively backed abortion rights. "There are several legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion," she wrote, such as "if her life is at risk, rape, a congenital birth defect", or "severe medical conditions".

She "seems to have joined a long line of Republican former first ladies" who have "come out in support" of abortion rights, "putting them at odds" with their husbands' public statements on the issue, said the BBC.

What about those conspiracy theories?

She might also have to face a new wave of claims that a body double is used for some of her appearances, such as in 2017 when her coat and sunglasses made many wonder if the White House was trying to hide something.

The conspiracy theorists are right in one sense, said The London Standard, because they are reflecting a more mainstream narrative that she doesn't want to "comply with the traditional role of FLOTUS".