Melania Trump penned a Washington Post op-ed Friday only for the piece to be savaged in the newspaper’s comments section within minutes of its publication.
The column, timed ahead of Mother’s Day this weekend, casts mothers as “the foundation” of American democracy and the “first teachers of empathy, aspiration and discipline.”
It calls for restoring “the honor of motherhood after years in which feminism often placed career above family, with consequences to our nation,” while urging women to lead boldly at work and to make time for self-care. The piece ends with the first lady reeling off a list of her own initiatives.
The reception was brutal.
“Your husband compared a reporter to a female dog the other day,” read one top-ranked reply.
“Motherhood has never been dishonored,” wrote another. “The only thing that dishonors mothers is when a husband cheats on his wife with another woman and fathers a child out of wedlock. You might want to address that with both your husband and Pete Hegseth.”
A third commenter dismissed the piece as out-of-touch theater: “She lives a life of excess and materialism and she’s telling mothers—some who work two and three jobs—to do more at home but make sure they take time for self care? She has raised an entitled nepotism baby and has done NOTHING with her platform as first lady. What a disgrace.”
Others questioned the byline outright. “Donald Trump, five children from three wives, and brags about grabbing them by the you-know-what. There’s a moral voice for you,” one wrote. “Does Bezos’ devotion to the Trumps have no bottom? Also, clearly not written by Melania.”
Since Donald Trump’s return to office, owner Jeff Bezos has narrowed the paper’s opinion pages to what he termed “personal liberties and free markets” in what many of his former staff now term an open capitulation to the MAGA president. The rightward shift has triggered the loss of more than 375,000 digital subscribers.
Opinion editor David Shipley resigned in February 2025 rather than execute the new mandate. Veteran columnist Ruth Marcus quit a month later after publisher Will Lewis spiked her dissenting column, writing that columnists’ freedom to choose their topics had been “dangerously eroded.”
Former executive editor Marty Baron, who ran the newsroom during the first Trump term, has accused Bezos of “cravenly yielding” to a president openly hostile to the press. Jonathan Capehart left after nearly two decades, citing the First Amendment.
Associate editor David Maraniss has meanwhile vowed he would never write for the paper again as long as Bezos owned it. In February, Bezos cut roughly a third of the staff, eliminating the sports desk and gutting the foreign bureaus. The paper’s Ukraine correspondent learned of her firing from a war zone.
The first lady’s column also follows after Bezos poured an estimated $75 million into her documentary, Melania, last year. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel called that sum a “bribe,” while critics uniformly panned the movie, with Variety dismissing it as a “reality show devoted to shutting reality out” and the Independent summing it up as a “ghastly” piece of propaganda.
