The Lie at the Heart of Melania’s Speech

During the government shutdown of 2018–19, President Donald Trump nixed a long-planned trip by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan. During that same shutdown, Melania Trump spent $35,000 of public funds to fly to Florida so she could spend the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend there, although her husband remained in Washington. The trip was her second solo trip to Florida in less than a month; she also traveled apart from her husband in Washington over New Year’s Eve, again at public cost.

When Donald Trump was elected president, Melania Trump at first refused to move to Washington with him at all. The purpose of the delay, Mary Jordan reported in her book about Melania Trump, was to leverage a more advantageous prenuptial deal out of Trump. Once the money was secured, Melania Trump relocated. But if the delay was indeed about a renegotiation, the process came at incredible expense to taxpayers. Melania Trump did not relocate to the White House until June 2017. The first three months of that delay alone—January, February, and March—imposed $675,000 in travel costs on taxpayers. That figure emerged only because of court proceedings; the cost of her full six months in New York remains a secret. And to put the figure in perspective: The cost to taxpayers of only those first three months was double Michelle Obama’s average total annual travel cost.

Doing as little for public good as possible, grabbing as much as possible from the public Treasury: That has been the approach of the whole Trump family during the Trump presidency.

Read: The invisible Melania Trump

The story Melania Trump narrated in the Rose Garden was, of course, just the opposite. There, she spun her very occasional public acts as a public contribution on the scale of her predecessors’, who all did far more, at less expense. To do the spinning, she violated an important restraint on the use of the White House, and almost certainly involved her staff in violations of federal election law.

The text of Melania Trump’s speech was rambling, vapid, and disconnected from reality. It mixed sad laments about the partisan and cultural divides that her husband foments and exploits, and that she herself has done little to overcome, with partisan slams at opponents and the media. “No matter the amount of negative or false media headlines or attacks from the other side, Donald Trump has not and will not lose for you,” she said. But the speech in its full context revealed much about the family side of the Trumps: the damage they have done in office, the damage they will continue to do if given a second term. That approach framed the spooky blankness of the first lady’s face and the empty falsehood of her words.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.