The designer of Melania Trump’s inauguration outfit recently asserted that everyone is reading too much into her bold decision to wear a giant hat that hid her face. “For the message she tried to send … there is none,” Hervé Pierre told Hello! magazine. “I wonder how many of your readers, when they get dressed, are thinking: ‘What is the message I will give to the world today?’ Certainly none of them, [and] it is the same for Mrs Trump.”
Sure, the First Lady probably wasn’t intentionally referencing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? as an inauguration Easter egg for millennials. But the only way her outfit could have been more on theme was if she’d shown up wearing a red-and-white-striped Waldo beanie.
Just three weeks into the second administration of Donald Trump, the yearslong game of “Where’s Melania?” is back on. The First Lady hasn’t been seen in public since January 24.
From October to Inauguration Week, Melania seemed to be signaling that her days of avoiding nearly all of her husband’s political events were behind her. She released a best-selling memoir, complete with a kooky social-media campaign and a handful of promotional Fox News interviews. She was by Trump’s side at his final 2024 rally, on Election Night, on New Year’s Eve, and at all the typical inauguration festivities. She even announced that she was filming a documentary for Amazon that would provide a “behind-the-scenes” look at her efforts to reestablish herself in the White House.
But Melania’s return to public life has been short-lived. On January 24, she joined the president to visit disaster zones in North Carolina and California. Since then, she has missed multiple high-profile Trump events, as the Daily Mail noted, from his trip to the Super Bowl to multiple meetings with foreign leaders to a dinner for GOP senators and their spouses at Mar-a-Lago.
The Melania PR machine has been pretty quiet too. She posed for photos in Hello!, which were “taken at an airport outside of New York a few days after the California trip,” per the Daily Mail. The accompanying article quotes “three of her most trusted advisers,” but not the First Lady herself. Since regaining control of the @FLOTUS X handle, Melania has only posted three messages: one accompanying her official White House portrait, one expressing sympathy for those killed in the American Airlines crash, and this statement announcing that White House tours will resume later this month:
Did Melania actually participate in the drafting of this statement? Is she currently holed up in the White House residence? Ensconced in Trump Tower? Hiding out on the beach as GOP politicians descend on Mar-a-Lago? Who knows?!
One week before her husband’s inauguration, Melania told Fox News that this time around, “I will be in the White House.” This sparked headlines about her plan to be a full-time First Lady, though her next sentence was more ambiguous: “And, you know, when I need to be in New York, I will be in New York. When I need to be in Palm Beach, I will be in Palm Beach.”
So maybe the First Lady is in the White House right now, or maybe this is one of those times when she “needs” to head to an undisclosed location and ignore everything politics related. I know I’d spend much of the second Trump administration hiding under the covers in my mansion if that were an option!
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