The program became an ungainly catchall for anything the first lady did, whether she was visiting addiction treatment facilities or reading to children or talking about online safety with teachers. There were missed opportunities for real work: She rarely lobbied Congress on behalf of Be Best’s myriad efforts. In one memorable moment, she failed to mention the coronavirus at all to a room full of educators at the annual National Parent Teacher Association conference in Virginia. It was March 10, 2020.
Though she picked up the pace of her appearances over the years, either making stops for Be Best, campaigning with her husband, or traveling abroad with him or solo, she often spoke in prepared remarks, if at all. They were usually full of platitudes like the ones in her farewell address, and useful for eliding any detectable personality. That made it all the more shocking to hear her speak off-the-cuff, using her upset voice in a phone call with her former friend and aide, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who leaked it to press this past fall.
In the absence of words, her clothes and expressions were often left to speak for her. It’s possible that her biggest success during her time in the East Wing was driving the public and press mad with gestures—a slap of the president’s hand, a smile that vanishes as quickly as it came—and with clothing choices that, in theory, could have been a statement: pussy bow, pith helmet, the white pantsuit.
Think of the inauguration four years ago. She looked like she was going to make a real go of this first lady thing. She wore a Ralph Lauren suit (American designer! business!) in powder blue. It had a midcentury shape to it and so it recalled Jackie O (beloved, worldly first lady!). Her hair was swept back in a sensible low chignon (business again!). She was playing the part.
But actors come and go from a stage, and that’s what Melania did. Any idea that she would support American fashion brands fell away, as she never really did it with any consistency. (Obama had made explicit efforts on that front, mentioning J.Crew on Jimmy Fallon, for example, and wearing fledgling designers like Jason Wu to the first inaugural ball. Perhaps that is another odious comparison.)
As Winston Wolkoff told me and anyone else who asked, Melania was frustrated by attempts at interpreting “meaning” in her clothing, so much so that she wore a message on her back at the border in June 2018: a Zara jacket that said, “I really don’t care. Do u?” Though her official mouthpiece Stephanie Grisham said it meant absolutely nothing, just another case of folks reading too much into things the first lady wore, Melania eventually said in a rare interview that it was about the press, and how she doesn’t care what they say about her, while also claiming she is the “most bullied person in the world.” It echoed her husband’s bent toward hyperbole and self-pity.
Otherwise, she wore what she felt appropriate for any occasion, usually some American, or more likely European luxury label that would be at home in her former Upper East Side milieu. Without any real personal style of her own beyond luxury, she usually looked as if she was wearing really expensive costumes on a movie set. Looking back, the inaugural Ralph Lauren comes across as just that.
When I think about her legacy, I always come back to the first lady’s own words, written in a tweet that’s still up from way back in 2012: “What is she thinking?” Melania wondered. The mystery, the implied intrigue, the invitation to guess at something you can never know.
With the question she paired a photo of a beluga whale, appearing to laugh at us before slipping back away beneath the surface, invisible again.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Inside the Always Online, All-Consuming World of Twin Flames Universe
— Rudy Giuliani’s Daughter, Caroline, on How to Accept That Trump Lost
— Carl Lentz, Ranin Karim, and Hillsong’s Unfurling Scandal
— Billie Eilish Shares How She Spent the Pandemic in Latest Time Capsule
— The Queen Says Goodbye to Her Beloved Dorgi, Vulcan
— Barack Obama on His Book, the Election, and What Actually Makes America Great
— How We Unmasked the Hollywood Con Queen Suspect
— From the Archive: Her Most Loyal Subjects, a History of the Queen’s Kennels
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.