Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday, and in the hours since, he unsurprisingly hasn’t been shy about sharing how he feels about it. (Total witch hunt.)
Meanwhile, the world hasn’t heard a peep from Trump’s inscrutable wife, Melania. She accompanied her husband to dinner at Mar-a-Lago Thursday night, but as usual, she was seen and not heard. Since Trump’s indictment involved the ex-president’s alleged attempt to cover up an affair with a porn star, it definitely falls under the bucket of things a wife might conceivably care about. But no, she hasn’t said a word or shared anything on social media.
This has led to a lot of idle chatter about how Melania may have taken the news. Jimmy Kimmel imagined her smiling for the first time in years. At least one person used A.I. to generate an image of the former first lady screaming at her husband’s arrest. Social media users have already moved on to who Melania should date after her inevitable divorce: Pete Davidson is the clear favorite.
It’s all speculation, of course. This is hardly the first time many of us have struggled mightily to understand the enigma that is Melania. During the Trump administration, it sometimes felt like we were all tourists at Buckingham Palace, waving our hands manically at the royal guards, desperately searching for even the tiniest flinch of a reaction. But Melania, ever impenetrable, always stared straight ahead—and stood by her man. In public, I would expect to see much of the same this time around. But in private, at least, reports have implied that it’s a different story.
If sources like People magazine are to be believed, then sorry, Jimmy Kimmel, but Melania is not celebrating this. She’s reportedly annoyed with her husband and doesn’t like anyone to bring up the porn star, whose name is Stormy Daniels, or the hush money. But she’s not so annoyed that she would actually do anything drastic. Mostly she’s hoping the whole thing will just blow over. After the indictment, the Daily Mail reported, via “a source close to the first lady,” that Melania plans to stick beside Trump, as she has through many past scandals. A few days before, an anonymous source told People: “Melania is leading her own life, and still feels happy being at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by people who love her and who never talk about reality, or bad things about her husband.” This checks out—Melania will do anything to stay out of the fray, up to and including pretending that the fray doesn’t exist. She certainly managed to hide her head in the sand during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021: She claimed to be extremely busy helping with a White House rug photo shoot at the time, thus preventing her from even knowing it was happening.
Some sources told People that though the Trumps are frequently seen together in public, they live in separate areas of their estate. Melania seems to spend a lot of her time with her parents, who also live at Mar-a-Lago, and her and Trump’s 17-year-old son, Barron. “They live in a fairy tale world and just deal with things as they come and seem to survive pretty well,” a source told People. “They do what is possible to get past the problems without disrupting their lifestyle.” As long as Melania can live in luxury with her parents and son and otherwise doesn’t see her lifestyle seriously disrupted, it seems like she’s pretty content to stay in that fairy-tale world. Inertia is very powerful.
The Daily Mail reported, however, that Melania does not currently plan to be present at her husband’s arraignment, denying us all the pleasure of seeing what outfit she would have deemed arraignment-appropriate. All for the best—more time for Melania to work on her NFT collection.