Melania has shown us exactly who she is

Believe her.

A scene from another life (Marsabit, Kenya, March 2016)

This is Melania Trump’s last full day as First Lady. She spent the final stretch ignoring the Capitol riot for days, and then releasing a bizarre statement that was largely about her. She has been a model of poor sportsmanship and bad manners, as she and her husband make unprecedented snubs of the Bidens. When Melania was coming in as First Lady, Michelle Obama graciously invited her for a White House tour, carrying on a courtesy that Laura Bush had extended to her, and that Hillary Clinton had extended to Laura Bush. Melania has refused to reach out to Jill Biden at all. In her farewell video to the nation, she didn’t bother to mention the incoming First Lady at all. No wonder she has the lowest favorability ratings of any First Lady ever.

Still, I am fascinated by Melania. How does someone choose to marry Donald Trump? How does she stay married to him, even as he insults her, belittles her, cheats on her, and clearly views her with significant contempt — can you put a dollar figure on that existence? Is it possible for a living human being to be so wholly vacuous? Is it worse if she agrees with her husband, or is it worse if she truly, fully does not care?

I’ve admittedly never felt pity for Melania. I didn’t (and don’t) understand the #FreeMelania tweets or the belief that she is a victim of her husband’s cruelty and philandering, stuck helplessly in a bad marriage because you can’t divorce the president. One very facile strain of pop pseudo-feminism applauds whatever a woman does as long as she’s empowerfully choosing her choice; to criticize a woman for, say, marrying a racist, misogynist shameful excuse for a man because she wants to be rich is misogynist and unfair. Another sees women who are adjacent to bad men as victims, not collaborators; if a man is truly evil, then his wife is an abuse victim, either trapped with few options or suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

I subscribe to a feminism that is, depending on how you look at it, either more cynical or more realistic: Women are people. And being people, women, like men, are wholly capable of being stupid, self-serving, evil, cruel, and power-hungry. Not every wife of a bad man is a victim, any more than every business partner, associate, collaborator, or promoter of a bad man is a victim. Not every silent woman is being silenced.

Before Donald Trump was president, Melania went on the Joy Behar Show to push the racist birther theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. She boasted about knowing her role in her marriage, saying she didn’t want her husband “to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” She said she calls her son “little Donald” and hopes he grows up in the image of his father. Like her husband, she has an allergy to the truth, lying about her education and exaggerating her charity work instead of just doing it. An immigrant herself, she stood by as her husband maligned and curtailed immigration, directing his cruelest policies at refugees, asylum-seekers, and desperate people at the border. She moved her parents (including her father, who seems to be a vicious misogynist and narcissist in his own right) into the White House as her husband waged war on the very “chain migration” system that brought them to the country.

This is not a woman who secretly disagrees with her husband and was shocked to discover how awful he is.

Melania is not a woman without options. It’s true her modeling career was only semi-successful, and was followed by a stint selling jewelry on QVC; it’s true there’s not a lot of work for 50-year-old women in the youth-obsessed modeling industry. But she could certainly seek out any one of a great many other jobs. And at any point during the Trump presidency, a divorce and a tell-all would have been a fantastic windfall for her. She could have used her perch to champion any cause, to do any amount of good; instead, she halfheartedly told children to “be best” online as her husband ranted and raved on Twitter. She is not a prisoner. She is one of the luckiest women on the planet, and she has chosen her position.

The best piece I’ve read on Melania is this one from Julia Ioffe, published in GQ in 2016, just as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination for the presidency. Ioffe talks with people who knew Melania way back when she was a girl in Slovenia, and then when she was a 20-something model (she married Trump when she was 28; he was in his 50s). The picture all of these people paint is rather flat: Melania was very beautiful. She liked makeup and jewelry and clothes. She was disinterested in others.

Melania Trump is a challenging figure for me to understand because she’s so unlike anyone I know well, and unlike most people I’ve ever met; I would imagine that’s true for most readers of this newsletter, too. After all, if you’re reading this, you are probably at least a little bit interested in the world around you — in politics, maybe in feminism. You probably read a newspaper or two. You probably have friends with whom you discuss current events and dig into issues you find important. Of course a huge proportion of people are disengaged with politics and current events, but most people I know are at least a little bit curious about life outside of their own surrounds, even if that curiosity doesn’t manifest in political engagement. They work to shore up their communities and cultures; they find meaning in literature or art or music; they use fashion and make-up as creative and artistic tools.

With Melania, there’s just… nothing.

I think this is why people whose lives are made busy with intellectual pursuits or cultural engagement or political obsessions or artistic work keep trying to fill Melania up with something, to make her as multi-dimensional and complicated as most people in the world. But maybe she’s not. Maybe what you see with Melania is exactly what you get: A largely empty shell.

In my experience, people like that are extremely rare, but they exist. And in my experience, people who are walking voids are harder to identify when they are very attractive — we see beautiful people and we want to imbue them with positive character traits, even when the weight of the evidence points in another direction.

Melania Trump has given us a wealth of evidence. It all points to one conclusion: There’s just not much there. And to the extent that she has views and opinions and principles, they are as vapid, reactionary, and mean-spirited as her husband’s.

I look forward to never having to think about her again.

xx Jill