“All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power,” Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in American Wife, her 2008 fictionalised study of Laura Bush. Sittenfeld lingered on the contradiction: a socially liberal Democrat, supportive of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, married to the most powerful conservative man in America. It was, in the end, a story about love and about the quiet erasure that marriage can demand – a story, too, about America. “She wondered who she was becoming in his shadow.”
It would be generous to assume Melania Trump exists in similar political tension with her husband. Across her on-again, off-again decade in public life, she has remained curiously opaque: at best a meme, at worst a grift. Yet the bare facts of her biography remain inherently cinematic. Childhood in communist Yugoslavia. The glamour and precarity of the 1990s modelling circuit. Marriage to a reality-TV tycoon who would go on to reshape not only American politics but global political culture. “Everyone wants to know my story,” she announces in the opening voiceover of her new, self-titled film. “Well, here it is.”
Except, it’s not. Here is absolutely nothing. Seventy-five million dollars (Amazon reportedly paid $40m for rights and another $35m on marketing) for two hours of almost pure absence. Melania glides, stern-faced and silent, through Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and into the official corridors of power in Washington. Heels high. Hair lacquered. Sunglasses fixed. The project, which is director Brett Ratner’s first feature film since sexual assault allegations made against him in 2017, has been widely slated as propaganda. But propaganda needs a message, and there isn’t one.
Instead, we trail her through the 20 days preceding last January’s inauguration: gilded penthouse to gilded jet to gilded Florida club. A flat, affectless narration, backed by relentless 1980s pop, delivers corporate-brochure platitudes: “Mar-a-Lago is more than a home. It’s warmth, family and friends.” “I will move forward with purpose and, of course, style.” Melania’s central tension, improbably, becomes whether the top of her now-famous inauguration hat can be made “less wibbly-wobbly”. When Donald Trump finally appears, it comes almost as a relief. Ah, a face that moves. A man without an internal edit button. Maybe his fresh appeal is the true point of the propaganda: after all, the president had tight editorial control over the project. In it’s opening weekend the film has exceeded box office predictions, bringing in $7m, but remains unlikely to turn a profit.
First Lady is less a job than a full-time performance: professional wife, brand custodian, symbolic citizen. It requires the surrender of identity, privacy and ambition to the mythology of the presidency. The work is aesthetic: hosting, dressing, endorsing causes sufficiently universal to offend no one. Jill Biden’s decision to continue teaching in 2021 was a historical first. Michelle Obama’s post-White House career reads like an extended exhale. Melania has occasionally acknowledged the transactional nature of her marriage, but accidental global symbolism is a long way from Manhattan society appearances.
Was this film an attempt to seize control of her own narrative? It gestures lamely towards the American dream: work hard enough, and you too might float, like Melania, inside a baroque penthouse in the sky. Hamfistedly, we hear that the US took in Tham Kannalikham, Melania’s Laotian interior designer, when she was two years old, giving her a place to dream and flourish. Hamfisted, as I say, at the best of times. But these are increasingly looking like some of the worst times for immigrants, or people who look like they could be immigrants, in America. Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) continues to terrorise streets across the nation, leaving communities too afraid to leave their homes. Last year, the federal force detained around 70,000 people, roughly 4,000 of whom were children, some as young as one and two. In 2025, 32 people died in Ice facilities.
The climax, late in the film, is Trump’s second inauguration, which feels like lifetimes ago. On 20 January 2025, Joe Biden smiles with polite vacancy while Kamala Harris checks her watch. Waiting to enter the Rotunda for her husband’s swearing-in, Melania looks directly into the camera. “Here we go again.”
And again. And again. And again.
Donald Trump’s shadow will continue to fall across America and the world for years after his presidency ends. But the narrative of Melania Trump is less clear. For all the money spent attempting to tell her story, it is still, conspicuously, unwritten.
[Further reading: Brooklyn Beckham is Prince Harry 2.0]
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Subscribe here to commentI feel a bit like I need to find a way to watch this… but without paying for it with anything more than hours of my life. I find myself simultaneously intrigued by her, but also utterly bored and uninterested.
In the past I’ve found myself wondering what she honestly thinks about Trump, his actions and her life, but with the feeling that we will never truly hear her honest opinions… perhaps though, we do and are hearing them… it’s just that much like this film appears to be in that there’s just genuinely nothing of substance there to see or hear.