The morning after Donald Trump was nearly killed on a stage in Pennsylvania, a nation reeling from an attempted assassination received a message from an unexpected quarter. “I am thinking of you now, my fellow Americans,” his wife, Melania, said. It was natural that she should say something. It was unexpected only in the sense that they are unaccustomed to hearing from her.
Trump has been campaigning all over the country. He spent a month in court in New York being tried and convicted for falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star. Fifty million Americans watched him debate President Biden on CNN last month. They saw Biden’s wife Jill, the first lady, on stage afterwards. They did not see Melania.
Such has been her detachment from the campaign that there were even questions over whether she would attend this week’s Republican convention to see him confirmed as his party’s nominee for the presidency. Appearing on the arm of a candidate as balloons rain from on high and all proclaim them the next president of the United States has been an obligation for generations of political spouses. Would she be there? Officials have offered vague responses, suggesting that she will appear tonight without quite saying so.
On Friday CNN reported that she would be there, citing two anonymous sources who said discussions were still under way over whether she should have a formal role in the proceedings. No one assumes that she will be at his side, and her rare public statements, against online bullying or to welcome newly naturalised immigrants to the United States, as she did at a ceremony in December, often seem to fly in the face of everything Trump represents. But after her husband was nearly assassinated the former first lady, who must think that she will soon be thrust into the role again, issued a long and at times tender statement reflecting on what it might have meant for her and their son, Barron.
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“When I watched that violent bullet strike my husband, Donald, I realised my life, and Barron’s life, were on the brink of devastating change,” she said in a letter published on Sunday. She thanked the Secret Service agents who dived on top of him after he was struck in the ear, and offered her sympathies to the family of a man at the rally who was killed in the shooting.
In the past Melania has been criticised for framing events that shocked the nation very specifically in terms of the effect that they were having on her life. After Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Melania declared: “I find it shameful that surrounding these tragic events there has been salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks and false misleading accusations on me.”
In June 2018, in the midst of uproar over migrant children being separated from their families as they crossed the border, Melania made a trip to a detention centre in Texas wearing a coat emblazoned with the words: “I really don’t care do u?” To some observers it looked as if she was talking about the children. She later explained that the message on the coat was part of an unrelated battle she was fighting against “people and … the left-wing media who are criticising me’’.
This time it made sense to frame a shocking event in terms of the effect that it might have had on her life and that of her son, Barron. It was, in a way, an echo of the words Jacqueline Kennedy said to Lady Bird Johnson aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, hours after the assassination of President Kennedy. Lady Bird, about to become first lady, asked Mrs Kennedy if she wanted to change out of her blood-stained dress. Not yet, she replied. “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.” The writer Robert Caro reported that she also said: “Oh, what if I had not been there? I’m so glad I was there.”
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Melania was not there. It seemed that, like many Americans, she was watching on television. But she could still show them what had almost been done. “A monster who recognised my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” she wrote. The phrasing was strange, and there were misspellings. She wrote “ring” when she meant “wring”. It sounded like her. “The core facets of my husband’s life — his human side — were buried below the political machine,” she continued. “Donald, the generous and caring man who I have been with through the best of times and the worst of times.”
Political disagreements “and political games are inferior to love”, she continued. “Our personal, structural and life commitment — until death — is at serious risk.”
She then issued a call for national unity. Many networks carried only brief parts of it for, viewed with a cold eye, its phrasing was clunky and thick with clichés. But who could begrudge her them at a time like this?
“We all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together, while we are here, in this earthly realm,” she wrote. “Dawn is here. Let us reunite. Now … I am thinking of you, my fellow Americans. The winds of change have arrived. For those of you who cry in support, I thank you … Thank you for remembering that every single politician is a man or a woman with a loving family.”
The statement framed Trump’s family as a small one. It was Trump and Melania and Barron. She did not mention his other children.
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Mary Jordan, one of her biographers, told this newspaper in April that if Melania had remained characteristically silent of late, that was in part because she had “been through a lot this year”. Her mother, Amalija Knavs, died in January. She was “the person closest to her in the whole world”, she said.
Since then all her focus had been on Barron, who finished school in May, Jordan said. “She lives and breathes for Barron. Her entire world has been her son, then her mother and father.” On social media on Mother’s Day Melania wrote that “nothing makes me prouder than the relationship I have built with my son”. Trump, for his part, had issued a Mother’s Day message that did not mention his wife, instead focusing on “the Mothers, Wives and Lovers of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, and Communists who are doing everything within their power to destroy and obliterate our once great country’’.
They looked, as they so often do, like two people living entirely separate lives. At the time, Trump was midway through a trial in New York in which one witness insisted that he seemed unbothered about his wife finding out about an alleged affair with a porn star and another recalled him blithely saying that if Melania left him he would not be “on the market” for long. But other witnesses, who worked in Trump’s White House, saw the couple as a team, and described him relying on her advice and calling her on the phone to wave at her, goofily, from the window of the Oval Office. His lawyers made a point of demanding that he be allowed a day from court to attend Barron’s graduation ceremony in Florida.
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Barron is 18 and towers over his parents. “He’s a big boy, six foot nine,” Trump said in an interview that month. “I say: ‘Barron. I don’t want to take a picture next to you.’” In a radio interview in Philadelphia Trump said his son “does like politics” and occasionally offered him guidance. “He’ll tell me sometimes: ‘Dad, this is what you have to do.’” He was expected to serve as one of 41 delegates from Florida at the convention this week, until his mother’s office rejected the idea. “While Barron is honoured to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments,” it said.
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If he starts college in September — there has been speculation that he may attend New York University — it could perhaps leave his mother freer to fill the role of first lady, albeit in her own way. Jordan describes her as “one of the most solitary people in public life that anyone has ever seen. You can’t exaggerate how solitary this woman is. She doesn’t keep friends from the past. She doesn’t stay in touch with people from her school or even models that she worked with. You can count on your hand the people that she really talks to. She’s just exactly the opposite of her husband, who loves a crowd, and loves to tell you how big the crowd is.”
Perhaps in time her son will speak. He made one of his first public appearances 14 years ago, on an episode of Larry King Live. “Hi, Larry!” he said. He had a strong Slovenian accent, apparently because he spent so much time cloistered with his mother and grandparents.
In May Americans heard from him again after a brief video clip circulated showing him in a dark suit and a gold tie at an event in a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. He was smiling and shaking hands with someone; he sounded like an American.
He made another appearance at a rally in Florida last week. “Where is Barron?” Trump called from the stage. “Stand up!” Barron stood and waved and pumped a fist as the crowd applauded. “Look at him!” Trump exclaimed. “That’s the first time he’s done it. Hey,” he added, as the applause continued. “You are pretty popular. He may be more popular than Don and Eric,” he added, referring to Donald Jr and Eric, his two sons from his first marriage. “Hey, Don!” he cried. “We got to talk about this, huh?”
