Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was at its heart about his relationship with women – but the woman who mattered most was conspicuously absent throughout.
Melania Trump didn’t appear once during the six-week proceedings: a disappearing act said to have irked her husband, who was pointedly supported in court by three of his five children: Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany. (Though not by Ivanka, once a key member of his White House administration, nor Barron, his teenage son with Melania.)
Pundits are clear that, politically, it would have helped Trump immensely had Melania, 54, been seen to stand by her man.
Yet what wife could have faced sitting in court to hear sordid testimony that her husband had slept with a porn star at a charity golf tournament while she was back at home nursing their new-born son?
Prosecution witnesses insisted that Trump had tried to buy the pneumatic Stormy Daniels’s silence for $130,000 in 2016 not because he was worried Melania would find out about his grisly assignation ten years earlier — but because he feared that news of it might hurt his election prospects.
Daniels, meanwhile, testified that the man 32 years her senior had seemed breezily unbothered about keeping their fling secret.
Some have assumed that the lurid courtroom circus contained nothing Melania hadn’t known before. But one wonders whether she had previously heard the claim – made by Trump’s former ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen – that Trump ‘wasn’t thinking’ about Melania in choosing to hush up the Daniels liaison because: ‘This was all about the campaign.’
Cohen further testified that when he had asked Trump if news of the affair might lead to Melania divorcing him, Trump casually replied: ‘Don’t worry … How long do you think I’ll be on the market for?’
As Trump rages about the ‘rigged’ trial, plots his inevitable appeal and calculates how the conviction will affect his election prospects in November, some have asked whether the sheer tawdriness of the proceedings could have a lasting impact on the ex-First Lady and the marriage.
In April, a source told the New York Times that Melania had accepted Trump’s argument that the case against him was a ‘disgrace’: a cynical attempt to damage his election prospects.
Yet if The Donald had consequently hoped for a public statement of support from his wife, none came. Indeed, according to insiders, Melania has privately referred to the Daniels case as ‘his problem’.
Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s former press secretary and chief of staff, said this week that she knew Melania’s absence from his trial ‘absolutely bothers him’, adding: ‘If Mrs Trump wasn’t at some event [when Trump was President] and it was really noted, he would definitely bring it up with her.’
Another ex-adviser, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, claims that behind her self-possessed facade, Melania has come to terms with her husband’s character.
‘She knows exactly who she married,’ Wolkoff wrote this week. ‘She’s a ruthless survivor.
‘A little courtroom drama won’t make her regret a thing.
‘As soon as this criminal case is over, she will be happy, relieved, back home with Barron in her bathrobe with a smile on her face.’ Melania and Barron, 18, reportedly sat out most of the trial at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.
Sources say, however, that they were in New York when the verdict was announced on Thursday – although Melania didn’t accompany her husband to an election fundraising dinner at a private home in the city that night.
Most well-informed observers believe the Trumps’ marriage will survive this latest turmoil.
The former First Lady was said to have been deeply angered and humiliated when reports of the Daniels affair first emerged in 2018.
Only two months before Trump met the porn star in 2006, Melania had overcome her natural media shyness to gush to Oprah Winfrey about her husband’s ‘amazing’ paternal instincts. (Biographers counter that Trump had made it clear to Melania that, if she had his child, he wouldn’t be actively involved in its upbringing, and he wasn’t even in the delivery room when Barron was born.)
When news of the dalliance broke, Melania did not join her husband, then president, on an official trip to Davos, Switzerland, heading to Mar-a-Lago without him. When she returned to Washington a few days later, she took a separate car to his first State of the Union address, appearing on the arm of a male military aide.
Sources have long maintained that their marriage is ‘transactional’. Melania, a Slovenian-born model, gained a fabulously rich, famous and influential husband, but was forced to come to terms with the stories about his womanising behaviour.
She is fiercely protective of Barron, the only child of their 19-year union, and was said to have been particularly concerned that his name was kept out of the hush-money trial.
Given that the young man has been brought up largely by his mother – with considerable help from her parents, Viktor and the late Amalija – it’s no surprise that he did not attend the trial, either.
Since Trump left office in 2021, Melania has largely faded from public sight, mostly living at Mar-a-Lago and making headlines only for occasional charity announcements and efforts to monetise her ‘brand’. In December 2021, for example, she announced that she would be releasing digital art – ‘NFTs’ or non-fungible tokens – with a portion of the proceeds funding scholarships for children in foster care. The auction received far less than anticipated.
Melania has further been spotted at her husband’s side at two key political events this year, both in Florida. She joined him at the state primary in March, although she missed his ‘Super Tuesday’ party at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks earlier.
After, she was reported to be ‘all smiles’ at a dinner that raised $50 million for her husband’s campaign, held by a Republican billionaire in Palm Beach in April, a source claimed that she was ‘ready to be First Lady again and clearly enjoyed the evening’.
Might these have been more evidence for their ‘transactional’ relationship? After all, last September it was claimed that Mrs Trump ‘quietly’ renegotiated her prenuptial agreement with her 77-year-old spouse.
A source emphasised this didn’t mean that she was preparing to leave him, but reflected the fact that his legal troubles and second White House run had forced her to take steps to ensure she and Barron were cared for financially. ‘Melania is most concerned about maintaining and increasing a substantial trust for their son,’ said the insider.
Barron has just finished high school and is heading to university – although his father recently revealed he hadn’t made up his mind about where to go.
Insiders say that, no matter what happens next, Trump knows he needs to keep his wife sweet as he tries to keep millions of American voters – especially women – on side.
As Melania’s former aide Stephanie Grisham points out: ‘At the end of the day, she can make or break his candidacy.’