Are Donald Trump and his wife secretly estranged – or is Melania just a bit strange?
That somewhat grubby question cuts to the heart of one of the more mysterious subplots of the Great Trump Saga, the longest-running American tabloid show.
One Trumpworld source told me that “Melania spends too much time online”
Yesterday, the First Lady magically reappeared for a public event at the White House. “I heard you missed me,” she began, before giving a speech about some goodly fostering initiative. “Here I am.” It was a joke her husband might have composed.
Melania hadn’t been spotted in public since the World Cup final a month ago, and the “Where’s Melania?” headlines have been sprouting up again amid all that Democrat-led speculation about her husband’s relationship with his young aide, Natalie Harp.
Mr. and Mrs. Trump clasped hands as he walked her to the podium. Was this, then, one of those dreaded marital shows of unity?
All fanatical Trump-haters will assume the answer is yes. For them, the fact that Senator Jon Ossoff – who just so happens to be lining up a bid for the presidency – made a jibe about Natalie last week led inexorably to Melania’s reappearance.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. That’s the point about Melania: nobody knows, she comes and goes, she ebbs and flows in her own peculiar way. She often goes missing for weeks at a time, which has long been a source of global intrigue.
And it’s sensitive. The Trumps are known to be extremely litigious, and even the most avid gossips in President’s orbit clam up when asked about the real nature of their relationship.
What seems indisputably true is that, like many power couples, Melania and Donald spend a lot of time apart. She prefers to operate her business, which is her brand, from their triplex Trump Tower penthouse in New York.
When in the White House, Mr. and Mrs. Trump operate from different quarters, which is normal, and it has been widely reported that the couple do not share a room. Again, that would not be particularly weird for an older plutocratic couple – and who would want to sleep with a man who likes to start posting on social media at all hours?
The Daily Beast, a professionally anti-Trump media outlet, breathlessly reports that Melania has only made 38 public appearances and suggests that is a mere 22 percent of what Michelle Obama’s workload was.
But 38 public appearances is hardly “MIA,” as the Guardian claims. The truth about Melania is not necessarily that she’s absent, but that everything she does is gloss-tinged and weird – enigmatic in a way which may or may not be a subtle nod to something we do not altogether know. She really cares about fashion, and that’s precisely the sort of thing fashion people do.
In March, she did that weird catwalk entrance alongside a robot for an AI event. She’s overseen some presidential honey-making enterprise, involving a model White House beehive – honeytrap? – and she made Queen Camilla wear an AI headset with some children in the White House lawn.
One Trumpworld source told me that “Melania spends too much time online. She just reads stuff on Twitter and goes off.” That may well have explained her bizarre and sudden public statement about Jeffrey Epstein, delivered on April 9 in which she said: “I am not Epstein’s victim.” She insisted the “lies” linking her to the disgraced sex criminal “need to end today.”
Quite what motivated that outburst remains unclear. It certainly appeared to take the President by surprise. At around that time, Melania’s name had been dragged into a bitter custody battle between Paolo Zampolli, the man who introduced her to Donald in 1998, and his partner, the former Brazilian model Amanda Ungaro. Then again, nobody knows if that has anything to do with it.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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