President Donald Trump’s scheduled address to a bipartisan joint session of Congress on Tuesday may look and feel like a MAGA rally.
The first lady’s box will represent the Trump-Vance campaign’s most iconic moments and promises—an assassination attempt, border crackdowns, deportations, transgenderism, and Putinism.
Melania Trump’s guests include survivors of a firefighter who was killed by the president’s would-be assassin, and mothers whose children were murdered by “illegal aliens.” One is a middle school teacher—from Butler, Pennsylvania, coincidentally—whose release from a Russian prison Trump personally negotiated with Vladimir Putin as the two leaders forge a closer alliance.
The wife and children of firefighter Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter who was killed by the gunman who sought to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, will be seated with the first lady, who until now has been mostly absent from both the 2024 campaign trail and her husband’s first several weeks in office.
“Fight, fight, fight” became the rallying cry to the White House when Trump stood up, dazed with his face bloodied after a bullet grazed his ear, pumped his fist, and commanded his followers—as he had on Jan. 6, 2021— to “fight.”
Also joining Melania Trump is a mother from Tallahassee, Florida, who sued the school board after her daughter’s middle school allegedly covertly “socially transitioned her daughter to a different sexual identity.”
Trump and Vice President JD Vance made anti-transgender attacks a focal point of the 2024 presidential campaign, winning over voters with promises to get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools” and “keep men out of women’s sports,” as Trump told his Madison Square Garden rally. Pledging to upend Joe Biden’s “woke military,” their rallies often featured clips of Stanley Kubrick’s macho-toxic drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket humiliating recruits.
Also seated with Melania Trump will be a North Carolina high school athlete named Payton McNabb whose parents say she suffered a traumatic brain injury after a transgender opponent spiked the volleyball in her face. “Payton joined with the Independent Women’s Forum and has made it her mission to put an end to this brutal unfairness,” the White House said.
Other guests include the mother of a 12-year-old girl in Houston who was murdered by two undocumented immigrants, the mother and sister of Laken Riley, the slain nursing student in Georgia whose name graced the title of the first bill Trump signed into law this year.
Front and center will be Marc Fogel, a middle school teacher who was released from a Russian prison and returned to the United States last month after Trump brokered his release in a prisoner swap with Vladimir Putin. Fogel, who was arrested and charged with bringing medical marijuana into Russia in August 2021, will be joined by his 95-year-old mother, Malphine Fogel.
The Kremlin’s release of Fogel wound up turning U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine upside down, with Trump announcing he and the Russian dictator had begun “peace” talks to end the war and, later, publicly ridiculing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office before vowing to cut him off from more U.S. military aid.
Melania Trump will also be joined Tuesday night by a 15-year-old girl from Texas who was bullied at school and taunted with AI-created deepfake porn—a new pet initiative for the first lady, who opened up in her memoir about her experience posing nude for photo shoots during her modeling career.
The first lady also invited: the widow of a New York Police Department officer who was shot and killed at a traffic stop in Queens last year; a U.S. Border Patrol agent who the White House says has “been shot repeatedly by cartel members” on the job near the Rio Grande in Texas; a steel plant worker and volunteer firefighter from Alabama; and a “Be Best” original—a former foster child who was given a scholarship from the first lady’s organization to attend Middle Tennessee State University.
“These men, women, and families come from all different walks of life with incredible stories about the disaster wrought by the previous administration, and the historic achievements President Trump has already enacted to usher in the Golden Age of America,” a statement announcing Melania Trump’s guest list said.
But they all have one thing in common: serving the culture war interests of the 47th president.
