In March, at which point Donald Trump had been running for reelection for months and his wife’s absence from his campaign was becoming harder and harder to ignore, a reporter finally got Melania Trump to comment on when she would join the fray. “Stay tuned,” Melania said. This two-word quote was reported widely; “Melania Trump Teases Potential Return to the Campaign Trail,” CNN’s headline read.
Months later, with the race in its finishing stretch, you have to laugh. We stayed tuned, all right—long enough to see that the answer to when Melania would assume the traditional duties of a campaign spouse was, more or less, never.
By consistently skipping campaign events, Melania trained the public and the media to have such low expectations of her that when she did pop her head out of the sand a few times in these last weeks of the election, it was treated with astonishment. That’s what happened this past week, when news outlets remarked on Melania’s “surprise” and “rare” speech at Trump’s ill-fated Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. It was as if they were having trouble believing that she was actually acting like a normal campaign spouse for once. She also this week assured Fox News her husband was “not Hilter.” Just in the nick of time!
To be fair, she has shown up here and there—at the Republican National Convention, she didn’t give a speech, but she at least showed her face, and she went to that one fundraiser that just so happened to come with a handsome paycheck. But it’s fair to say Melania will end this election season having redefined what it means to do the bare minimum as a campaign spouse in a modern presidential race. She dared to ask, “What would happen if I just … didn’t?,” and it seems to have affected her husband’s campaign almost not at all. Did she at least make room for future candidates’ spouses to also fuck off and do their own thing when their husbands and wives are running for something? Honestly, probably not—this seems like one of those things that might be unique to Trump. Plus, that would be doing something, which she has mostly opted out of.
Don’t be deceived by her interviews with Fox News, including the one she did on Tuesday. If you watch, it’s striking how much more focused she seems on selling her recent memoir than she does on urging the audience to vote in the election that is just days away. While many first ladies release memoirs, most don’t choose to do it mere weeks before their husbands’ presidential races, presumably because they don’t want to be distractions. But this is also when “attention is high and remains monetizable,” as Carlos Lozada recently wrote in a New York Times column. “Why should Donald be the only one hawking merch during the homestretch?”
All these absences may have taken a toll. How else to explain what happened on Fox & Friends when one of the hosts asked Melania how she feels about the “rhetoric that’s out there today” calling her husband things like “a second Hitler.” (Was it “rhetoric” or was it reporting about a comparison he himself made? Who can say?) “It’s terrible,” Melania replied. “He’s not Hitler, and all of his supporters, standing behind him … ” The answer trailed off, and eventually led to a string of headlines like this one from the Hill: “Melania Trump: My Husband Is ‘Not Hitler.’ ” If Melania and her handlers were actually being strategic about when to deploy the mysterious former first lady to maximize her impact, they can’t be pleased that the outcome was a bunch of articles in which she entertains, and ultimately rejects—but does entertain!—the possibility that her husband is Hitler. This is what happens when you ghost an entire campaign season.
To cap off her historic run as least supporting spouse, Melania plans to spend Election Day at home in Palm Beach, she told the Fox & Friends audience. If Trump wins, God help us, but if he loses, I’m thinking there is a nonzero chance that we never see her again.
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