After all of Donald Trump’s many misdeeds, his wife, Melania, has remained largely quiet. It’s what she does. Melania Trump remained in New York after her husband’s presidential inauguration, claiming that she didn’t want to interrupt their young son Barron’s school year. However, Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan revealed in a book published last year that Melania delayed moving into the White House, using it as leverage for renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with her husband.
Melania also defended her husband over the vulgar Access Hollywood tape before the election. “I heard many different stuff — boys talk,” Melania Trump said in October of 2016. “The boys, the way they talk when they grow up, and they want to sometimes show each other, ‘Oh, this and that,’ and talking about the girls. But yes, I was surprised, of course.”
She also remained largely quiet just after her husband’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th, causing mayhem, death, and countless injuries.
So, what’s her problem?
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One Palm Beach insider recently told People magazine: “It is safe to say she plays the game for personal gain. Around here, that is not a bad thing.”
The outlet spoke with four of the former first lady’s biographers over the course of a year, who have covered her for decades: Kate Bennett, Kate Andersen Brower, Nina Burleigh, and Jordan, People reports.
“Despite Mrs. Trump’s reluctance to reveal her interior life, there is consensus among her biographers: The former first lady is “tough” and smart and knows what she wants out of life and out of her relationship with the former president, 74, with whom she has formed an enduring if unsentimental bond,” the report states.
“And she enjoys the power and benefits of her elevated station,” the outlet reports. “She also mirrors her husband’s values — prizing public image and loyalty — and nowhere was that parallel more stark than after the Capitol insurrection, when she did at last choose to speak.”
“According to Bennett and Jordan, the former first couple both value fealty and their personal brands, although they have gone about it in reverse ways: He is all reality-star pomposity and businessman braggadocio, while she built up higher and higher walls even as the White House made her internationally famous,” the report continues.
“She liked all the accouterments that go with being first lady and living in the White House,” Bennett said. “I think she actually really enjoyed it. In fact, I know she did. But did she dream one day as little girl in communist Slovenia that she would be first lady of the United States? Absolutely not.”
“Mrs. Trump was “the most reluctant first lady we’ve had in modern history,” Kate Andersen Brower told the magazine.
“The first lady is supposed to act as the ‘consoler in chief,’ especially when you’re married to a man who is so inept at consoling people and has a real empathy gap there,” Andersen Brower said. “She should be the one who is speaking to the American people and reassuring Americans that things are going to get better and being positive, in the way Laura Bush did after 9/11. But we just don’t hear that from her.”
It’s all about money. Quelle surprise!
“Her main driver, according to the people that I talked to, she kept saying — ‘I just want an equal share for Barron,’ ” Jordan said. “Meaning an equal share to the older three who are always front and center, Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka.”
“They told me over and over again,” Jordan said, “‘There was more in it for her to stay than to go.’
And none of this is surprising. Melania departed the White House as the least popular first lady in this history of polling. That’s something she has in common with her husband, who was the least popular president in U.S. history. Mrs. Trump’s legacy as the first lady will be her hypocritical anti-bullying Be Best campaign — and her silence.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Flickr/White House
