Something’s off with Melania. This speculation about the First Lady has existed as long as the Trump era itself. The theories have always worn tinfoil hats. Is she a body double? An extraterrestrial? A Russian spy?
In October 2017, during the first year of Trump’s first term, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde tweeted, “Absolutely convinced Melania is being played by a Melania impersonator.”
At bottom was the evergreen mystery of how anyone could stand to be married to Donald Trump. This “Melania” beside Trump in photos, acting wifely through gritted veneers, must be a decoy. “Theory: she left him weeks ago,” Hyde proposed.
But Melania did not leave him. Like a MAGA last-gasper in denial about Trump’s infinite betrayals, Melania stayed. Trump cheated on her—but she stayed. He ignored her birthday, forgot her name, and razed her side of the White House—but she stayed. Yes, she swats away his touch, sleeps alone, and seems to despise him. But, like so many blind Trump supporters, she’s apparently determined to give over her one life on Earth to this dance of death.
Melania’s brand combines high vanity and low self-respect. It doesn’t win her fans. Indeed, her unfavorability rating makes all other modern first ladies look like national treasures. In the summers of their own husbands’ second terms, Hillary Clinton had +25 favorability, Laura Bush had +46, and Michelle Obama had +42.
As of July, Melania Trump was at -13. That’s below circle-the-drain levels. “Melania Trump breaking records in the way that you don’t want to break records—historically awful,” Harry Enten said on CNN when she first hit -12. He also echoed her callous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket, the one she wore to visit children in detention centers in 2018.
“The American people really don’t care for her.”
Probably Melania was never going to win Miss Congeniality. She’s reclusive, for one. This year, she’s appeared only 38 times in public, including in one photo that shows her briefly deplaning Air Force One. When she does go out these days, it’s behind a mask of cosmetics, a curtain of hair, and clothing in funereal hues.
Her most striking appearance came in April, when she gave a panicked address before the White House press corps. She spoke cryptically and acidly of “lies” circulating about her and Jeffrey Epstein.
This speech, of course, pointed sleuths straight to the cause of her distress: rumors about whether teen-modeling kingpin Paolo Zampoli (now an employee of U.S. taxpayers as the “U.S. Special Representative for Global Partnerships”) or the unspeakable Jeffrey Epstein introduced the Trumps in 1998. Her features looked controlled, static, even synthetic. The common touch is missing for Melania. But the human touch is missing too.
For MAGA devotees, a Slovenian-born former model in dominatrix stilettos doesn’t exactly scream America First. To find another foreign-born First Lady, you have to go back to Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, who was born in London in 1775. She was admittedly extremely popular; but unlike Melania, she had an American father.
Then there are the 80 percent of us who are non-MAGA Americans. For us, it remains an article of faith that anyone with a beating heart must find Trump too repellent to tolerate. That’s why theories that Melania’s a simulacrum have never quite died.
Back in 2017, days after Marina Hyde’s tweet, comedian Andrea Wagner Barton posted a photo on Facebook to prove a Melania impersonator was in the mix. It was a blurry photo of Melania looking uncanny. Digital Zapruder sleuths were off to the races comparing noses. Google searches for “Melania Trump double” and “Fake Melania” skyrocketed.
These days, Trump, with his own marked likability issues, still considers Melania an asset. On Sunday, he posted a stylized press picture of him and his wife to Truth Social, next to a snap of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in the Michigan Senate race, and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s,” Trump’s caption read.
El-Sayed shot back on CNN: “Sarah and I actually like each other… I don’t know about the First Lady and the president, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a bit of a rocky road.”
What do Americans even need from first ladies? It’s a deeply conservative role, and Melania, though 57, doesn’t exactly conjure home and hearth. But first ladies are at least expected to engage in public advocacy for non-partisan causes. At this Melania has also failed. “Be Best” was a daftly named nothingburger.
On the other hand, she has shown some passion for self-promotion. Her flop documentary “Melania,” which was directed by accused sexual abuser and Epstein cohort Brett Ratner, was financed by Amazon in what looked like a bribe to her husband.
Undaunted, Melania has a limited reality series on Amazon coming out in the fall. It will give a restive nation another behind-the-scenes look at Melania’s stupor and suppressed irritability, this time in the first weeks of Trump’s current term. The preview for the series opens with Melania sighing “here we go again” and features disembodied stilettos sinking into carpets in what could double as content for OnlyFans.
In the meantime, tinfoil tall tales about Melania’s off-ness keep evolving. Now people speculate that Melania is AI. In May, she published an audiobook that was voiced by AI. “A NEW ERA IN PUBLISHING,” she wrote on X.
Also in the spring, Melania in white strode a red carpet with a robot in white named Figure 03, a humanoid programmed to do dishes and laundry. Like a slightly drugged but obedient homemaker, Figure 03, which has no eyes or mouth, has precise, slow-mo, melancholic movements and a soft girlish voice. For an audience who has never warmed to the First Lady, the jokes made themselves.
“One is a soulless, foreign-made device, sold by one shady businessman to another,” wrote a YouTube commenter. “The other is a robot.”
