When you watch Melania and her Manolos on the big screen, you will likely feel poor, ugly, and, if you’re also six months pregnant, a little fat. But unlike her husband, who perfected his persona as the everyman’s perception of a rich man into populism, Melania Trump is not accessible. She does not try to be. She does not kick off her stilettos to pretend she loves to live in a palatial kitchen, a la Meghan Markle, nor does she brandish a Princeton degree or freelance as a professor like her predecessors as first lady.
Melania, the documentary, is about the wife of the former and future president, who understands that her sole job is to be the wife of the former and future president, and she does it very well. It is a time capsule of one of the most unique moments of a unique woman’s life — Donald Trump’s reelection marked the second time in American history that a president won a second non-consecutive presidential term, and Melania Trump is the first naturalized American citizen to become first lady of the United States — but it is also an almost academic analysis of one of the highest profile and oddly thankless jobs in history.
Melania’s production and reception have proven much more polarizing than its content. Purchased by Amazon for $40 million and netting Mrs. Trump a cool $28 million in profit, Melania has grossed nearly $10 million in its first week, shattering expectations and breaking the decadelong record for a non-concert documentary. It also boasts a sky-high 99% rating among general audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and a truly dismal 5% among critics. Slate summed up the chattering class’s grievance that the film “contains nothing: no ideas, no point of view, no tension beyond whether the tailors will be able to properly alter her inauguration turtleneck.” In a New York Times roundtable lambasting the film, Nadja Spiegelman declares the “notable thing about this film is how boring it is.”
“The only setup for narrative tension is whether the hem of her dress will be perfect by the time the inauguration happens,” says Spiegelman. “And even that setup — which is the setup of so many reality wedding shows, like, Will the invitations be printed on time? — gives us no narrative tension.”
The real grievance, methinks, is not with Melania, the person, but with the first lady as a job.
From the role’s inception, the job of the first lady has plagued its inhabitants as paradoxical. Martha Washington, who was addressed as the near-noble “Lady Washington,” was equally criticized as a vestige of the monarchical tradition the country had just fought a revolution to escape. The job of the first lady, so far as it exists, is and always has been to hold court, serve as the social glue of the White House, and privately counterbalance a temperamental president but never politically outflank him. Although the official Siena College ranking consistently votes the notoriously political Eleanor Roosevelt as the nation’s best first lady, she’s really the anomaly. The rest of the most favored first ladies by historians are those who were mostly apolitical fashion icons (Jackie O and Michelle Obama) or consummate hostesses who parlayed their social operations into genuine benefit for their husbands (Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison).
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE DC BUBBLE WENT TO SEE THE MELANIA MOVIE
Melania Trump understands that choosing table settings with diplomatically significant countries of origin and making nice with Queen Rania and Brigitte Macron is indeed the job. If Donald’s job is to blow up the status quo in both Washington and the world stage, Melania understands her assignment: to sweeten relations and put the room back in order while looking immaculate doing it.
Two-for-the-price-of-one first ladies — the Hillary Clintons and Edith Wilsons who mistake their husband’s political mandate for one of their own — tend to age poorly, even among the embarrassing left-wing groupthink of historians. Melania Trump knows this, and if anything, her refusal to kick off her heels until after 22 hours, loosen her seams, or complain about the ornamental nature of the job is why her haters have resorted to the absurd. Melania, according to the detractors, is too beautiful, immaculately dressed, elegantly comported, strategically silent, and astoundingly apolitical, outside of her laser focus on pet projects like liberating the hundreds of hostages held by Hamas or safeguarding millions of Ukrainian children under siege by Russia. Trump’s only winning card is not to play such a stupid game. The real Melania Trump does not apologize for perfection, because that would simply be inauthentic.