Brett Ratner’s new documentary about Melania Trump is long and glossy yet largely unrevealing—critics have said it has “the feel of a soothingly looped AI screensaver” and that it is “compelling as dental floss,” “short on substance,” and “a personality-study of a person who doesn’t actually have one.” They’ve used words like “hagiographic,” “unimaginative,” “Sphinxlike,” and “stultifying.” The Bulwark called it a “pure and naked instrument of graft and propaganda” that “preaches to the faithful with great reverence.”
But Carl Sferazza Anthony takes a somewhat different view. He’s an expert on First Ladies—he’s written 12 books and served as the historian of the National First Ladies Library—and he thinks the film does reveal important things about Melania Trump, including her perfectionism and the distance in her marriage. In a conversation on Tuesday, he offered some context from White Houses past while insisting that we take Melania on her own terms.
What I got from the movie is that Melania Trump is basically autonomous. She doesn’t seem to be living with the President. Her day-to-day life does not have very much to do with him. She’s a glamorous person who is flying around and taking black cars places and meeting with fancy people—
Yeah, she’s walking across rooms in nice clothes. And that’s what a model does, isn’t it?
But why would that be the image she wants to show the American people?
Because maybe that’s who she really is.
She is a former model. She makes clear that since she was a child, she has been fascinated by clothing. When I heard her speak about the craft of it—the cut, the fabric, “half an inch here, half an inch there”—it showed her passion, that fashion is important to her. It may not be important to a lot of people, but it’s important to her, and this is a portrait of her.
What do you feel like you learned about Melania from watching the movie?
There’s a perfectionism in her. She said something revealing about how she couldn’t let her mind wander off of the task at hand, that she had to keep busy and keep focused on things. She’s very controlling of all the little factors: What time do we arrive? Where do I stand? “Let me fix the hat, it’s an eighth of an inch too large.” For a lot of people, that’s a life under control—but there’s a perfectionism there, and that can be harmful. And I came away with a feeling of somebody who’s essentially shy and is forcing herself not to be shy.
There’s been lots of criticism of this movie. Some people have called it Trump-family propaganda. Others are upset about the financial element: Reportedly, Melania pitched this movie directly to Jeff Bezos, and then Amazon paid a sort of wild sum to license it. What do you make of that?
I’m of two minds. On the one hand, if she were out of the White House making this kind of money, it would seem fairly in line with what former Presidents and First Ladies do. They get paid a lot for memoirs and speaking fees. On the other hand, when she became First Lady in 2016, she filed a lawsuit against a British publication that implied that she had started an unsavory business. She won. But in that lawsuit, her lawyer wrote, essentially, that this rumor would substantially hurt her ability to make money as First Lady. It was startling to anybody who knows the role of First Lady, because it’s always been seen as an honor, an act of public service—and the way her lawyer wrote it, at least, was, “No, this is an opportunity for her to make money, and the rumor has hurt her brand.” That was really startling.
Is there precedent for a First Lady appearing to profit from the office?
There was somebody who profited as First Lady, and that was Eleanor Roosevelt. She really overtly profited. She not only wrote books while she was First Lady, but she was on the lecture circuit and she made money from that. She also had a radio show, and she would talk about the sponsors—the companies that were underwriting it. On the other hand, she donated almost all of those proceeds to charities. She used those jobs as a way of raising money during the Depression for organizations that needed help.
So there wasn’t the same sense of the family personally profiting from the office?
Well, there was a Congressional investigation into it. But the Roosevelts had a lot of enemies.
Melania is surprisingly explicit about the distance in the Trumps’ marriage.
Yeah, one of the biggest impressions I came away with is that she’s closer emotionally to her father than she is to her husband. There’s a real love and bond with her father, and I’m glad that they permitted that to be seen. It’s such a defining thing: that she really loves her father, and she was really, really close to her mother. And when her father spoke about how he was married for many decades, it was so palpable.
She comments on how her parents’ marriage informed her approach to her own marriage—but you really don’t see her and husband together very much, and when you do, he’s not super engaged with her.
No, he’s not. But let’s remember: this film was entirely in her control. What we saw was what she wanted us to see.
And why does she want us to see that?
That’s where you get into speculation about what’s going on, and I don’t know. But I go back to the way Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t appear with people that she didn’t like, or Eleanor Roosevelt was absolutely outraged by the internment of Japanese Americans, but she never used the words “I disagree with my husband.”
So you think she might be upset, even if she’s not making public statements.
There have been these moments. Jackie Kennedy was really angry at some of the hypocrisy of her husband’s administration during the Civil Rights Movement. And Nancy Reagan was angry at some of the people in her husband’s cabinet—one of them, in a bizarre effort to try and prevent the spread of HIV, suggested that all known gay people should be branded, and she was just shocked by the inhumanity of it. She talked to the President and refused to let that idea go anywhere.
So just because we’re not hearing Melania speak out doesn’t mean that she isn’t. We do learn later about arguments and things behind the scenes. There was no evidence [at the time] that Jackie Kennedy was speaking out about civil rights, or that Mamie Eisenhower was speaking out against McCarthyism, or that Eleanor Roosevelt was speaking out about the Holocaust, but they were.
I think some people would argue that with issues like civil rights or the AIDS crisis or what’s going on now with ICE, a First Lady might have an obligation to speak more publicly.
They might, but it could also end up generating more problems. Eleanor Roosevelt knew about what was being done to Jewish Europeans, and she tried to implore her husband to do something. She was trying to get him, as a lot of people were, to drop bombs on the railroad tracks that were transporting people to the camps. And he said, “If I do that, then when we are finally poised to take them over, we need those railroad lines to be working for our troops to complete the mission.” But we didn’t learn about that until decades later.
In the movie, Melania says, “One of my goals is to evolve the role of First Lady beyond formal social duties.” But it’s odd because the whole movie is formal social duties—it’s picking out tablecloths and outfits and invitations for the inauguration. So what did you take from that quote?
That she does not know the history of the role, because First Ladies have publicly been playing a role in policy for over 100 years. In fact, at the end of the movie, there’s a statement claiming that she’s the first First Lady to have influenced an executive order. But no, it’s not true. In 1912, Nelly Taft influenced the president to initiate health and safety regulations for federal workers in Washington, by presidential proclamation. So how much has her staff done research?
A lot of people seem to think this is an unrevealing and disgraceful movie about someone who seems to be extraordinarily shallow and also profiteering from the office. You’re not saying that, and I’m curious why.
Because she’s a human being. I think what I’m hearing from myself is that this is a person with maybe a lot of internal conflict, and it’s very easy to smooth that over with a glamorous bit of haute couture and a walk to the black car in her stilettos. But she is a human being, and we have to remember that. There’s got to be something that hits her. There’s got to be some nerve that’s hit when she sees what’s going on and knows it’s wrong. This movie is exactly what Melania wanted to present, but it remains somewhat cryptic. There’s elements that are very vague. I think about those stilettos and how happy she was to get to take them off. She wasn’t ambitious for this. This is a role she was thrust into.
