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For those who didn’t make it to the theatrical event, Melania Trump’s eponymous documentary debuted on Amazon Prime Video this week, and is worth watching because the film manages the rare feat of revealing far more about Melania Trump than she appears to have intended.
Leaving aside the astonishing fact that Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the privilege, an extraordinary sum for a First Lady to pocket for what amounts to a glossy exercise in a prolonged Instagram post, the film reveals, almost painfully, how lonely she seems to be.
Across all the carefully curated scenes, there isn’t a single friend. No one she’s filmed laughing with over coffee. No conspiratorial aside: “Can you believe it, Donald’s pulled it off again.”
Instead, the people orbiting her are all on the payroll, including event impresario David Monn, fashion designer Adam Lippes, and a rotating cast of stylists, aides and handlers. One supporting character, her husband, Donald Trump, pops into Melaniaworld only on occasion—and when he does, he’s clearly a visitor, not a resident. The documentary makes it very clear that the First Lady shares very little with the President, including a language she speaks even less fluently than he does.
The documentary seems intended to showcase a modern, mysterious Melania. But it leaves you wondering if there is anyone in her life who isn’t billing by the hour.
This isolation was underlined again this week when Melania marked Women’s History Month by explaining, somewhat bleakly, that she describes herself as “Often alone at the top.” The President stands behind her, listens to his wife declare that she feels oh so lonely… and has zero reaction. He glances around, offering no sympathy or agreement.
In the same speech, Melania declared herself “a visionary” and assures us that she doesnt let her solitude slow her down. No, it fuels her. “My creative mind dances, filling my imagination with originality,” she asserted. The words are interchangeable. None really makes sense. (To paraphrase playwright Tom Stoppard, an actual visionary: “Words, words, words, they’re all she has to mangle.”)
Still, Melania insists that she is driven by curiosity and passion. But curiosity and passion for what, exactly, remains elusive.
For someone who has spent five years as First Lady in the DC fishbowl, Melania’s own history remains curiously unknowable. Beyond the familiar shorthand that she came from Eastern Europe and worked as a catalog model, the details are surprisingly thin. How exactly did she secure the rare “Einstein visa” granted to individuals of extraordinary ability? Even the origin story of how she met Donald Trump has a suspiciously shifting quality.
Melania’s only obvious companion is her son, Barron Trump, now nineteen, an age when most young men are eager to live a life that doesn’t involve a mother hovering protectively around. (Recent online sightings showed him deep in earnest conversation with a Russian woman in London.)
Meanwhile, her White House initiatives remain baffling. “Be Best,” her signature campaign, never quite made sense—grammatically or otherwise. And her recent speech at the United Nations Headquarters championing “peace through education” rang hollow when delivered against the backdrop of her husband’s foreign policy theatrics and the Tomahawk missile bombing of a girls’ school on the very first day of the war in Iran. The death toll from that strike is up to 175.
But surely this shouldn’t be so hard? Prior First Ladies all managed to find causes that connected them to the country: military families, literacy programs, school nutrition. Betty Ford changed how America thinks about addiction. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis cared about culture–ballet, opera, art–and was a strong advocate for beauty, planting roses in the White House garden. The Trumps, by contrast, had the historic White House Rose Garden ripped up and paved over so female guests could walk across the patio in stilettos.
In this second administration, Melania seems determined to present herself as a misunderstood figure of substance. Instead, she lands somewhere else entirely. A portrait not of vision, but of vanity, venality, and vacancy.
For more on Melania Trump’s “100 Years of Solitude”—not that she needs another opportunity to plagiarize...— follow Joanna Coles at PRIMAL SCREAM on Substack.
