Editor’s Note: Peggy Drexler is a research psychologist, documentary producer and the author of “Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family” and “Raising Boys Without Men.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers. View more opinion on CNN.
First lady Melania Trump is packing her bags and planning her departure from the White House, according to CNN reporting.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone, and not just because President Donald Trump still won’t accept that he lost to Joe Biden, even after the US Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear yet another challenge to the election results, and even as he continues to tweet accusations of fraud and compare the election to that of a third world nation.
And yet, the first lady appears to have reached the acceptance stage – and perhaps eagerly, it would seem. Why wouldn’t she?
After four years – in a relationship that she knew from the start was at least “in some aspect … transactional, no matter how much she loved him or how much he loved her,” as Kate Bennett wrote in her 2019 biography of Melania Trump – she has mainly held up her end of the First Couple franchise. Mission accomplished. And whatever Melania Trump’s attempts now to fashion a legacy, as she is reportedly pondering as she leaves her East Wing role behind, she may in fact be most memorable for being not so memorable at all.
Now, according to Bennett’s reporting on CNN, Melania Trump is figuring out what to put in storage, what of her personal belongings to take from the “people’s house” to send to the family’s New York City apartment, and what should go to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, where she will go, post-haste, with their 14-year-old son, Barron (he’ll reportedly finish out his school year there).
And she is busy redecorating; her personal decorator has been for the last several weeks focused on the couple’s new main address at Mar-a-Lago. Focus, no doubt, officially shifted.
She has also (perhaps tellingly) inquired, according to two sources familiar with the discussions, about whether there were taxpayer funds allocated to supply her a budget and staff for post-White House life (there are not).
Sources also said, according to Bennett, that like other former first ladies she is indeed giving some thought to her legacy – the causes to support, the memoir to write. It’s possible, said a publishing industry source, there will be a coffee table book about her design influence in the White House, which has included renovating the Rose Garden, building the tennis pavilion, and most recently, choosing the administration’s official china service, per the custom of outgoing first ladies.
Of course, given the minor press her White House projects have received – including her relatively modest “Be Best” initiative (aimed at helping children) – and the first lady’s scant interest in taking part in the role, even a coffee table book seems to be more than her public should expect. After all, she has spent nearly four years largely silent and steely-eyed.
But there were noteworthy moments that will certainly live on. Like when she tweeted a remembrance of Pearl Harbor with the wrong date (she quickly deleted it). Or wore a Zara jacket on her way to visit detained immigrant kids at the border that read on its back, “I really don’t care, do u?”. It seemed a pretty unambiguous statement. (She later told an ABC News interviewer that her intent in wearing the jacket to visit the children, who had been separated from their parents, was to tweak the “left-wing media.”)
She also didn’t show much interest in the public’s expectations of displays of affection for her husband. Indeed, there have been countless examples of Melania Trump’s apparent sheer disinterest in publicly touching the President, spontaneously smiling at him or walking near him, with the few exceptions of the last four years coming in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, when they made a few shows of PDA.
What becomes of Melania Trump? We may never know the details of the couple’s marital arrangement – aside from details revealed of their prenup, supposedly renegotiated before she agreed to move to Washington, DC, following his 2016 win – which might offer a clue about her options.
And her inquiries about the taxpayer funds for post-FLOTUS endeavors may suggest she’d be unable to leave him (were she so inclined) completely without a supportive arrangement. Then again, they were just inquiries, and she IS a Trump: why leave free money on the table?
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In the end none of us know what’s going on inside another’s marriage, despite what we might try to predict from tea leaves. Certainly many – particularly those who have long fantasized that Melania Trump was a victim to be freed– would like to see her jump the Trump ship, now that the gig is finished. Certainly it would give her profile a boost.
But that is, as it has been with this inscrutable first lady from the start, speculation. In fact, her swift preparations for moving day, are likely telegraphing something as simple as this: At the very least, Melania Trump is quite ready to move the hell on from this presidency, pretty much like many of the rest of us.
