A troop of Trumps had joined their patriarch there over the convention’s three previous days. Don Jr. and his fiancée, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, had been frequent fixtures. So had Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, the Republican National Committee co-chair. Even Tiffany Trump, once a rare sight on the campaign trail, appeared every night with her husband, Michael Boulos.
Ivanka, Donald Trump’s eldest daughter and former senior White House adviser, has kept her distance from the 2024 campaign. So has her husband, Jared Kushner, who had been a key strategist in his political operation. Barron, Donald and Melania’s only son, hadn’t been around either. There was one Trump, however, whose absence had been most conspicuous.
Finally, around 8:30 local time Thursday night, it seemed the blessed visitation was imminent. The VIP box was conspicuously empty; Trump, who had been sitting there with a handful of GOP lawmakers and celebrities, was nowhere to be found. Then, “Soul Man” played, and a parade of Trumps filed in. She would join them soon, but even then, the question lingered.
Where is Melania Trump? It was a question that sparked curiosity far beyond Milwaukee this week. Google searches for “Where is Melania Trump?” spiked each night of the convention, peaking around the time Trump made his nightly triumphant entrance without his wife.
Rows of delegates craned their necks. “Is that her next to Trump?” one wondered aloud. Nope, that was Lara.
But when Eric Trump finished his speech, Donald Trump, once again, left the box. The opening strains of the third movement of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9” (Op. 125) floated from the sound system.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the next first lady of the United States,” the announcer said.
Delegates sprang to their feet. Screams of delight echoed across the bowl of the arena. Melania glided along the convention hall’s crimson carpet in a skirt and blazer of the same color. A wide, placid smile stretched across her face. With every few steps, she gave a small wave.
For many attendees, it was one more wish fulfilled. The Republican delegates who missed her public appearances couldn’t wait to see her.
“She’s so elegant,” Dalene McCormick, 59, a delegate from Hawaii, said on the convention floor Wednesday. She teared up as she talked about the former first lady and the recent attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pa.
“You can just tell how much he loves her — and how much she supports her husband,” McCormick said.
But what took her so long? To the Republican delegates who admire her, Melania’s absence was understandable.
“Primarily, she is all of us — a wife and a mother first,” said Kim Coleman, an RNC committeewoman from Utah. “Someone attacked her husband this week and almost killed him. That’s who she is right now, having survived that.”
“It’s always family first,” said Mindy Colbert, 42, a delegate from Indiana. “She may need time to process all of what happened.”
“I’ve been married for 38 years — I’d be hiding in a closet if that happened to me,” said Tammy Burnham, a delegate from Illinois. “There’s no way I could face the public.”
Even before the shooting, Melania’s attendance at the Republican National Convention wasn’t confirmed. Trump supporters can explain that, too. Maybe she was still mourning her mother, who’d passed away in January. Maybe she was trying to maximize her time with Barron, who’d be leaving for college in a few weeks. Why would she want to come here, anyway, and subject herself to the critics? Jill Biden, they’ll remind you, has been featured in Vogue three times, but Melania — a former model! — never was.
“She’s been so disrespected — she can do nothing right,” added Burnham. “I’d feel betrayed by this country, if I were her.”
On Thursday morning, the campaign promised she’d be in Trump’s VIP box later that day. Doubts lingered: CNN rotated through conflicting chyrons throughout the afternoon — she’ll be there, she won’t be. Just as the convention hall began to fill with delegates for the night’s festivities, the Daily Mail published a photograph of the former first lady, in a black blouse and khaki skirt, boarding Trump Force One with Jared and Ivanka.
So, she’d be there — but she wouldn’t speak. Melania’s Republican National Convention debut in 2016 had been a disaster. Her speechwriter had cribbed sections from remarks Michelle Obama delivered at the Democratic convention in 2008. Her address in 2020, however, had been a relative triumph. Where her husband delayed acknowledging the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, she offered her “deepest sympathy” to those who had lost loved ones to the disease. In a summer of civil unrest, Melania acknowledged the “harsh reality that we are not proud of parts of our history.” Where Donald Trump resisted responsibility for wrongdoing, Melania noted error and fault. “Instead of tearing things down, let’s reflect on our mistakes,” she said, “and look to a way forward.”
Each first-lady-in-waiting approaches the campaign trail differently, but usually to the same intended effect: to humanize her husband. That task has instead fallen to the next generation of Trumps, who participate in his political operation to varying degrees. Don Jr. is his most consistent political road warrior, performing a sort of MAGA-inspired stand-up routine about “his father” at pro-Trump gatherings around the country. Lara posts videos of her children curled onto their grandfather’s lap in the penthouse of Trump Tower. Both Trump sons and their partners took the convention stage this week, taking care to refer to the former president almost exclusively as “my father” or “my father-in-law.” Kai Trump, the former president’s 17-year-old granddaughter, made her political debut. “A lot of people have put my grandpa through hell, and he’s still standing,” Don Jr.’s daughter said to cheers.
It wasn’t just that Melania hadn’t been at the Republican convention before she stepped in Thursday’s spotlight on the floor. She hasn’t really been seen in public, period, since her husband launched his reelection campaign. She didn’t go to the New York courthouse or the D.C. courthouse or the Georgia courthouse or the Miami courthouse when her husband pleaded not guilty to a collective 88 charges. She’d missed his conviction on hush money charges in May, leaving her husband in the care of some of his children.
The last time she made a campaign appearance was more than 20 months ago, when Donald Trump announced his third run for the presidency from the gilded confines of Mar-a-Lago. She hasn’t been to a single campaign rally of the 2024 cycle — including the one Saturday in Pennsylvania when her husband survived an attempt on his life.
The violence coaxed a rare public statement from the typically taciturn first lady. “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” Melania wrote in a statement on Sunday. “The core facets of my husband’s life — his human side — were buried below the political machine.”
She’d been called upon to humanize her husband in circumstances far beyond her control. Melania would do the rest, it seems, on her own terms.
Trump told the story of the shooting for the first time on Thursday night. He stood before a backdrop of photographs from that day, a dozen copies of his bloody ear blown up and stacked several stories high. As he talked about the “bullets flying” over him, the former first lady sat in her white armchair, solemn and perfectly still.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said. “Yes, you are!” the crowd began to chant.
Melania looked around the room. A small smile spread across her lips.
Jesús Rodríguez, Dylan Wells and Sabrina Rodriguez contributed to this report.
