Melania Trump’s discreet role at the Republican convention eight years after plagiarizing Michelle Obama

Melania Trump featured prominently at the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland (Ohio). Her speech drew admiration, until it was discovered that, to a large extent, it plagiarized the one given by Michelle Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention. After the Covid pandemic forced the convention to be held virtually in 2020, Trump’s wife is expected to be physically present at the Republican gathering in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), but her role will be discreet.

Trump’s wife broke her silence with a long statement on X after Saturday’s attack on the former president, although she was not there at her husband’s first public appearance after the incident, on Monday night. “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,” she posted. “The core facets of my husband’s life—his human side—were buried below the political machine. Donald, the generous and caring man with who I have been through the best of times and the worst of times. Let us not forget that differing opinions, policy and political games are inferior to love.” The current first lady, Jill Biden, called her later on Sunday, according to the White House.

While Jill Biden has become a prominent political ally of her husband—she accompanies him at significant moments and is capable of holding up to three rallies in a single day to ask for the vote—Melania Trump has only had a testimonial presence in the Republican campaign. At the June 27 debate in Atlanta, Jill Biden was with the president, but the Republican candidate showed up alone. Melania Trump has not participated with her husband in any of the mass rallies he has given throughout the country; she has been absent from the Republican primaries and has not been with him at his court appearances.

One of these was especially hurtful to her. Trump was found guilty of 34 charges for falsifying checks, invoices and accounting records to conceal payments to silence the scandal of his alleged relationship with porn actress Stormy Daniels and prevent it from influencing the presidential campaign of 2016.

By not accompanying the former president to the trial, Melania Trump was spared hearing the detailed account of how, according to Daniels, the magnate received her in his hotel room in silk pajamas, that after going briefly to the bathroom she found him in bed in boxers and a T-shirt, that he blocked her way to the exit and that they ended up having sexual relations without a condom. Trump has also been sentenced in a civil suit to pay $5 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of having raped her in a Manhattan luxury department store.

A low profile figure

Whether or not these cases have anything to do with it, the truth is that Melania Trump has stayed away from almost all of her husband’s public events. She was by his side in November 2022 when he announced at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach (Florida) that he would run in this year’s presidential elections. She voted in the Florida primary last March. In addition, she has attended several closed-door fundraising events, the last one held at her home in New York for conservative members of the LGTBI+ community. She also accompanied her husband to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in March.

These are isolated or low-profile acts. For whatever reason, Trump’s wife has stayed out of her husband’s agenda. But she is on the list of participants at the Republican National Convention, a decision that had already been made before Saturday’s attack. However, she is not on the list of speakers provided by the Republican Party. The candidates’ partners often give speeches in which they describe the careers and personal qualities of their spouses.

Melania Trump gave a speech from the White House at the 2020 convention, which was held online, but the one that has gone down in the collective memory is the one she gave in Cleveland in 2016 that partly plagiarized one that Barack Obama’s wife had given eight years earlier in Denver. Her speechwriter resigned when the plagiarism was discovered.

Melania Trump, 54, was born in Novo Mesto, which was then part of the former Yugoslavia and is today in Slovenia. The former model is Trump’s third wife. She met Trump in 1998 in New York at a party organized by the business tycoon. Their relationship became public in 2004 and the couple married on January 22, 2005. They have an only son, Barron, born in 2006.

She was the second first lady of the United States to be born abroad (after the UK-born Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, president from 1825 to 1829) and the second to profess the Catholic religion after Jacqueline Kennedy. She was also the first whose native language was not English, the first to have appeared nude in magazines, and the first without American ancestry. An immigrant at a convention with immigrants in the spotlight.

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