There is a particularly telling moment during the official trailer for Melania, the documentary about the First Lady of the United States that lands exclusively in cinemas next week, which I think explains why she is one of the 21st century’s most fascinating human beings.
The film is about the days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration, exactly a year ago today. So we see the 55-year-old preparing to wear The Hat – the millinery equivalent of a barbed-wire fence or a chastity belt – the brim so large it allowed her to repel her husband’s lips when he tried to kiss her after being sworn in.
We see her discussing security with an aide, and embracing her son Barron, now 19, who at 6ft 9in towers over everyone he encounters. (One hopes the documentary will reveal if he still has a Slavic lilt, and if it’s true that his first language is his mother’s Slovenian, as opposed to his father’s American-English.)
We even see the former model (shock, horror) smiling.
But the bit that shows just why this woman is worth spending $40million (£30million) on – for that is the eye-watering amount of money Amazon is said to have paid the First Lady, beating off rival bids from Disney and Paramount – comes right at the end of the 67 second-long clip.
She is in her office, looking over the Manhattan skyline at night. It is a room decorated in 50 shades of gold.
There are walls covered in marble, a statue the size of a small London flat. There is a Louis XIV desk upon which sits a single white rose, which Melania must surely know is the symbol of President Snow, the murderous dictator from the dystopian young adult novels The Hunger Games.
There is also a priceless Renoir painting, which viewers might reasonably mistake as the room’s single concession to taste. Alas, it is a mere copy, the actual masterpiece from 1874 hanging 3,500 miles away in The Courtauld in London
But most of all, there is Melania, on the phone to her husband. ‘Hi Mr President, congratulations,’ she purrs patronisingly, doing her very best impression of Marilyn Monroe.
‘Did you watch it?’ he replies, referring to an unknown event. His tone is unusually lovestruck and needy.
Melania Trump wearing The Hat – the millinery equivalent of a barbed-wire fence – the brim so large it allowed her to repel Donald’s lips when he tried to kiss her
‘I did not,’ she responds curtly, more than a little dismissive. ‘I will see it on the news.’
And there, in one short shocking exchange, we see why so many women admire Melania Trump. It’s not because we like her – to do that, we’d have to know her, and she’s hardly the most forthcoming of First Ladies. And it’s most certainly not because we want to be her. (I can’t be the only one who felt queasy when US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr revealed in a podcast recently that the President’s doctor said Trump had ‘the highest testosterone level’ of anyone over 70 he’s ever seen.)
No. It’s because, in one short phone call, Melania can do what many of the world’s most powerful can only dream of: and that is to put her big bully of a husband in his place.
It’s no mean feat, to be able to deflate the puffed-up chest of this self-styled strong man.
And yet so often, Melania is dismissed as pneumatic, robotic, the real-life iteration of a Stepford Wife. Many paint her as a kind of prisoner in a loveless marriage, one for whom, during Trump’s first term in the White House, concerned supporters on the internet came together to create the hashtag #freemelania.
But increasingly, it is becoming clear that this is to misunderstand the power of the woman. After all, she used the dramas that surfaced during his first election campaign – the infamous ‘grab ’em by the p***y’ comments, not to mention his affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels – to renegotiate her pre-nuptial agreement so it had better terms for her and Barron.
Pitying her as a trapped wife misses a valuable opportunity to try and work out the psychology of a woman able to tame the otherwise irascible President.
So, yes, Melania may be the only First Lady to have posed nude for a men’s magazine on her husband’s private jet (GQ, in 2000). And, yes, she may also be the only First Lady to have visited a centre for displaced children wearing a jacket which featured the statement ‘I really don’t care, do u?’.
But what we also know about Melania is that she is the only person to hold power and influence over Donald Trump. And as 2026 kicks off in the most bombastic fashion, that surely makes this girl from small-town Slovenia the most powerful person on the planet.
In an attempt to unpick the psychology of Melania, I spent an afternoon being turned into the First Lady by a crack-team of stylists, hair and make-up artists
Indeed, while Sir Keir Starmer and other European leaders fear squaring up to the President over Greenland at Davos this week, Melania has sauntered into 2026 with the kind of main character energy we all wish they could summon. Like her or not, what we all want to know is: how does she do it? Perhaps more importantly, why does she do it?
In an attempt to unpick the psychology of Melania, I spent an afternoon being turned into the First Lady by a crack-team of stylists, hair and make-up artists.
It involved an awful lot of fake eyelashes, not to mention a perfectly coiffed wig in Melania’s signature ‘bronde’ tone. There was also an impressively convincing Donald Trump lookalike, who caused a commotion wherever he went; whether it was the loo or the office canteen, everyone, young and old, wanted a selfie.
‘Hold his hand,’ requested the photographer back on set, and as my stomach turned a bit, I imagined that this is what it must be like to be Melania (give or take a few hundred million dollars in the bank).
The most important thing, when posing as Melania, is not The Hat or The Hair Extensions but The Scowl. Her face always seems to say what we’re all thinking, at least when it comes to her husband. No matter the event, no matter the fabulous designer frock, she always has the look of someone who, at best, barely tolerates him.
Spending an entire afternoon frowning had an interesting effect on my mood, causing me to dismiss everyone around me in the same derisive way as Melania.
Squinting scornfully at the camera, I wondered just how high your Botox bill would be if this was your day job – I, too, might disappear for weeks on end to the relative privacy of Florida if it meant not having to spend all day with my face puckered in anger.
The floor-length Burberry trench made me feel slightly better. With one swoosh of my luxury coat tails I could let my husband know what I thought of him without ever saying a word, my designer wardrobe creating an expensive wall around me.
With one swoosh of my luxury Burberry trench coat tails I could let my husband – an impressively convincing Donald Trump lookalike – know what I thought of him without ever saying a word
The contemptuous half-smiles, coupled with her love of a wide-brimmed, husband-repelling hat (she wore one again during the state visit to the UK last September), all combine to create the perfect physical embodiment of what so many women think about Donald Trump, and that is: not much, really.
There’s a great anecdote relayed by Mary Jordan in her meticulously researched unauthorised biography, The Art Of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. When asked whether she would have married her husband had he not been rich, Melania apparently shot back: ‘If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?’
The Trump camp naturally called Jordan’s book a ‘fiction’, but this titbit nicely sums up the dispassionate disdain Melania seems to feel for her husband.
Her infinitely meme-able icy cold stares have always been especially delicious – and fascinating – because we only get them if she bothers to show up by her husband’s side at all.
‘We haven’t seen such a low-profile First Lady since Bess Truman, and that’s going way back in living human memory, nearly 80 years ago,’ said Katherine Jellison, a historian and expert in First Ladies who spoke to the New York Times for a piece last May with the headline A Most Sensitive Subject In The White House: Where is Melania? At that point in Trump’s second term, she had been seen in Washington on fewer than 14 days, with sources claiming she disappears for weeks at a time, preferring to be alone in their New York penthouse or at Mar-a-Lago.
But Melania’s behaviour in the last couple of months suggests we’re about to see a lot more of her.
Note the megawatt silver dress she wore to the annual New Year’s Eve party that the couple hold at Mar-a-Lago. Between her fantastic cleavage, the £1,300 gown made by Turkish designer Ilkyaz Ozel and the matching sequinned Christian Louboutins, it was hard to know where to look. Certainly, it wasn’t at her husband, who, when you finally noticed him, appeared every one of his almost 80 years.
This was not the look of a woman hoping to go quietly into the new year. Indeed, 2026 may well be the year of Melania. At least if that bombastic trailer for the documentary is anything to go by.
As you might expect of a teaser promoting a film due to have its world premiere in the renamed Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington next Thursday, understated it is not. Which is understandable given it’s directed by Brett Ratner, known for blockbusters including X-Men: The Last Stand, and the Rush Hour series. (He’s also known as a man against whom a number of actresses alleged sexual assault at the height of #MeToo, not that there’s any sign Melania’s worried about that.)
Mr Trump and Melania, in her Burberry trench coat, land at Heathrow for their state visit last September
One hopes the film will be more revealing than her self-titled 2024 memoir. Aside from small insights about the couple dancing at home to Elvis Presley and Elton John (‘whenever he had music playing at home, he’d crank up the volume and pull me into a spontaneous dance… his taste was eclectic, just like mine’), and her husband regularly calling her doctor to check on her health (‘he isn’t flashy or dramatic, just genuine and caring’), the book read as if it had been produced using ChatGPT.
You have to be careful what you say about Melania – she’s embroiled in a big lawsuit with the American author Michael Wolff, and has threatened to sue Joe Biden’s son Hunter for claims he made about her and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – but she did confirm the audiobook was narrated by an AI version of her voice.
And when she does make one of her rare public visits to the White House, it’s usually to talk about technology and how it will shape children’s futures. ‘The robots are here,’ she told an audience last year, apparently without irony. ‘As leaders and parents, we must manage AI’s growth responsibly.’
Proving she is truly a digital first lady, she launched her own meme coin (a type of cryptocurrency) called $MELANIA last year. And while her critics might suggest she has all the charisma and personality of a digital avatar, sources claim this is mostly because she has spent the last two decades dedicating her life to bringing up her only child, Barron.
Now the 19-year-old is safely ensconced at New York’s Stern School of Business, like many mothers, Melania may well be feeling it’s time to step back into the spotlight – and what better way than with this documentary showing us just how she manages to control the petulant President.
No more wide-brim hats. No more hiding in Mar-a-Lago. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait.
Melania (MGM Amazon) is out on January 30.
