Melania Trump is phoning it in

There’s something admirable about Melania Trump’s commitment to doing absolutely nothing. While America obsesses over her husband’s latest provocations, the First Lady has opted for absence – and turned it into a pretty lucrative enterprise.

Consider this month’s rare emergence from her self-imposed exile. As rumors swirled that Donald’s vendetta against Harvard stemmed from the university rejecting their son Barron, Melania was finally compelled to issue a public statement. The denial was characteristically terse: Barron never applied to Harvard, and all such assertions are “completely false.” How fitting that the woman who spent a mere 14 out of the first 108 days of her husband’s second term at the White House should surface only when the family brand requires management.

When Melania does deign to appear publicly, it’s hardly worth phoning home about. Her recent Rose Garden ceremony alongside Trump to sign the Take It Down Act – legislation criminalizing revenge porn that she championed – was a masterclass in minimal engagement. She described the new law as a “national victory” for protecting children online, yet managed to convey the distinct impression that she’d rather be anywhere else. Even her advocacy feels performative, a carefully choreographed appearance designed to tick the “caring First Lady” box before retreating once again to Manhattan. 

But Melania’s true masterstroke came last week with the announcement that her memoir’s audiobook would be narrated “entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice.” She heralded this as the future of publishing – apparently unaware of the irony. Nothing quite captures the essence of a deeply personal memoir like having a computer read your most intimate thoughts with all the emotional authenticity of a satnav announcing the next junction.

The AI narrator serves as the perfect metaphor for Melania’s entire tenure. Why engage in the tiresome business of actual participation when you can simply outsource it to a machine? She has managed to author a book about herself without even troubling herself to read it aloud. Fitting for the woman who once wore a jacket reading “I really don’t care, do u?” on an official trip to visit migrant children in detention. At least required her physical presence; now she can broadcast her indifference without bothering to show up at all.

What’s remarkable is how Melania continues her masterclass in having it both ways. She remains simultaneously the most absent First Lady since Bess Truman and one of the most entrepreneurial, launching cryptocurrency tokens and securing a reported $40 million documentary deal with Amazon while maintaining her aristocratic distance from the vulgar business of governance. Political wifehood is just personal branding, the constitutional role as just an optional extra.

She’s the anti-transparency First Lady, someone who’s figured out how to be present while absent, engaged while disengaged – and apparently, how to write books without actually writing them. It’s a kind of genius, really.