Melania Trump is a woman of few words: she Be Best at brevity. Now that the first lady is getting ready to vacate the White House, however, it looks as if she may have found her voice. Rumour has it that Melania is planning to write a memoir about her time in public office. “She’s not done, or going as quietly as you might expect,” a mysterious source recently told the New York Post.
Well, of course she isn’t. Melania may not have the gift of the gab, but she is good at grabbing any opportunity for self-advancement that comes her way. When Donald Trump took office, a lot of liberals seemed to want to see Melania as a victim. #FreeMelania memes circulated; theories that she had done a runner and been replaced by a body double abounded.
But Melania, it has become painfully clear, is no shrinking violet. She is no victim. She is every bit as conniving as her husband, not to mention petty: if Melania’s former friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, is to be believed, the first lady spent a large part of the past four years devising devious ways to undermine Ivanka. During the inauguration, for example, Melania reportedly launched “Operation Block Ivanka” and arranged the seating to ensure that you could not see the first daughter on television during the president’s swearing in. Princess Ivanka was blocked by Queen Melania’s head.
Extreme pettiness is not a good trait in a human being. However, it can make for excellent content in a memoir. I have high hopes that Melania will fully embrace her dark side after leaving the White House and take down the Trump family in a scandalous tell-all. If she does not dish the family dirt, her memoir risks being extremely anaemic: her time as first lady has not exactly been action-packed, after all. Chapter one: It was Be Best of times and Be Worst of times; I launched an anti-bullying initiative despite being married to the world’s biggest bully. Chapter two: Stormy Daniels compared my husband’s genitals to “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”. Chapter three: I went on a Kenyan safari in a weird colonial hat. Chapter four: I ranted about migrant children and Christmas. Chapter five: I dug up the Rose Garden. Chapter six: I contracted coronavirus.
As Melania prepares for the next chapter of her life, it seems that she has already started throwing her nearest and dearest to the wolves in an attempt to clean up her image. On Monday, the New York Post published a fawning piece about the first lady, declaring that she had been done a severe disservice by Stephanie Grisham, her chief of staff and press secretary. One imagines the insiders quoted in the piece are pals of the first lady who have been instructed to launch Operation Rebrand Melania.
There has been a lot of mirth about the idea of Melania writing a memoir, but I have a horrible feeling that she is the one who will be having the last laugh. She may not produce anything like Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, but she will make a quick buck and become even richer. Her husband may need to be dragged out of the West Wing kicking and screaming, but Melania is going to strut out smirking and scheming.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
