Critics agree that what’s missing from Melania, the 104-minute, $75 million docu-bribe from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, is what it’s meant to reveal: the person inside the couture clothes and stiletto heels, a soul in the machine with even a single quirk, curiosity, or desire. Lauren Collins’s takedown in The New Yorker is headlined “A Forty-Million-Dollar Journey into the Void.” The subtitle of a videotaped panel in the New York Times’ opinion section is “Watching a First Lady Vanish in Plain Sight.” Owen Gleiberman, writing in Variety, may get closer to the truth: “Melania, like the Trump regime, is a designed-from-the-top-down reality show that’s devoted to shutting reality out.”

Still, the film is not about nothing. It just is not about Melania. Like everything in Trumpworld, it is—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—about Donald Trump. Melania bills itself as an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the work of the president-elect’s wife in the twenty days before Inauguration Day. But as that date nears, his face dominates more and more of the frame; his blather begins to drown out her ChatGPT-like voiceover. “Here we go again,” Melania says to the camera, as she walks toward the swearing-in ceremony on an officer’s arm. But where she is going is only momentarily the White House. Soon, she will head home to New York—and out of the picture.

The denouement of Melania takes place in a sitting room in what was probably the East Wing, at 2 a.m. after Inauguration Day. Melania has been on duty for over eighteen hours, walking beside the president, holding his hand, holding the Bible on which he swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution he is about to shred, smiling cover-girlishly and dancing in his wooden arms at three consecutive balls—all the while in the towering high heels she appears to have been wearing the entire twenty days. Exhausted, Melania flops onto a couch and kicks off the shoes. The president trundles off to his room. The First Lady barely registers his departure. He barely registers her not-registering.

If the hand that held his was meant to humanize Trump and the shoes to glamorize him by proxy, if the flawless body was the trophy of his sexual prowess, all at once these signs lose their salience. The wife, like the shoes worn an uncomfortably long time, has outlasted her usefulness. She has become superfluous. In less than a year’s time, the East Wing, the First Lady’s domain, will be demolished to make room for one more monument to the Great Man.

The insular world of Melania Trump is a microcosm of the country Trump is presiding over in his second term. In Trump’s America, tech bros invent apps, like Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, that “nudify” and sexualize images of women and children without their consent and direct the deepfake sexual assaults where the user requests, including the victims’ social media accounts. This is a nation in which pregnant women who miscarry are prosecuted—or allowed to die—lest they be seeking an abortion, while the president’s Nazi podcaster pal Nick Fuentes declares, to an audience in the hundreds of thousands, that they should be sent to “the breeding gulags.” It is the world of Jeffrey Epstein, where women and girls serve as personal accessories, interior décor, and instruments of gratification, and the powerful, wealthy, white men they are compelled to serve are protected from legal accountability, or even embarrassment.

And when those female bodies cease to be desirable and useful, they are discarded. In a 2002 interview, Trump, then fifty-six, chatted with Howard Stern about the expiration date of female sexual allure:  “What is it at thirty-five, Howard?” Trump mused. “It’s called checkout time.”

Melania Knauss Trump was never interested in politics; she takes no pleasure in being First Lady. In the summer of 2018, she was secretly recorded during a phone conversation with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former confidante, in which she fumed about being criticized for her husband’s policy of detaining immigrant children separated from their families. “They say I’m complicit. I’m the same like him, I support him. I don’t say enough, I don’t do enough where I am,” she spat. “I’m working . . . my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

That October, traveling to visit those detained children, she wore a jacket emblazoned “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” on the back. She later claimed it was a message to the persecutory press. But it was also a sign that she didn’t see herself as part of the White House team, and the White House really didn’t care that she wasn’t.

During the first term, a crowd of journalists was kept busy interpreting Melania’s mysterious acts: the swatting-away of the president’s hand, the I-don’t-care jacket, the hastily canceled plans to accompany the president to Davos. Her “Be Best” campaign against cyberbullying was so flimsy it went virtually unnoticed, except when observers pointed out that her husband was the cyberbully in chief. (In Melania we learn she’s reviving the campaign for Term Two. Why invent a new one when the old one required so little work?)

If the First Lady’s ostensible projects were invisible, the First Lady herself was visible enough that when she was not, for three weeks in 2018, it was news. Officially, she was in the hospital for a benign kidney condition and then recovering. Yeah, maybe, said the diviners. Did she have a face lift? Was she punishing Donald for an extramarital affair? A video of Trump walking beside a woman who was not Melania but looked a lot like her launched rumors that she had a body double.

This term, Melania shows up now and then. At Fort Bragg on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, she addressed the troops with words in the family tradition—empty of logic or feeling. “I have a nostalgia-filled message: Happy Valentine’s Day,” she cooed, to whistles and hoots from the audience. “Love letters have symbolized the union of patriotism and family devotion among our soldiers for 250 years. The harmony of love of country and love of family is what make[s] us uniquely American. It is very balanced, which strengthens our military and builds our communities.” Oh. Kay. Then it was her “distinct honor” to introduce etc., etc., followed by a grand entrance by the president, hand to ear for cheers from the soldiers, contactless kisses on the wifely cheeks, and a half-hour of boasting and electioneering. She may well have been a body double.

We know that the Trumps’ marriage is transactional—all Donald’s relationships are. Both partners know the terms. Asked once whether she’d married for money, Melania replied, with an odd mixture of pride and self-deprecation, “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?” As Collins wrote in 2016, “The Trumps’ marriage, in business terms, might be thought of as a limited partnership, with Donald as the managing partner.”

Over the years, the subsidiary has spun out a steady profit. Before their marriage—her first, his third—Trump displayed her as his greatest sexual conquest. “Where’s my supermodel?” he liked to call out in public. In 1999, the couple gave an interview on Stern’s radio show. She allowed that she was wearing “not much.” He boasted of their great sex life and told Stern she had no cellulite, which he pronounced “cellalite.”  

Leading up to his election, when sex became a liability—the reports of infidelity and accusations of sexual assault, the “grab them by the pussy” tape—Melania kept mum. She was not just the proof of his potency. She provided marital legitimacy: the sexy wife as character reference (or witness). Making a rare appearance at a rally in April 2016, she described some other husband than the one standing beside her. “I’m very proud of him,” she said. “He’s [sic] hard worker. He’s kind. He has a great heart. He’s tough. He’s smart. He’s a great communicator. He’s a great negotiator. He’s telling the truth. He’s a great leader. He’s fair.”

By Trump’s 2024 campaign, the cheerleader was off the field. When the sex worker Stormy Daniels, whom he’d paid to shut up about their relations, quipped that his endowment was not as impressive as advertised, Melania offered no rebuttal. There were so few sightings of her in the years between his two terms that Business Insider could fit photos of them all in one article. Of ten in 2024, two were family events, and only three were campaign related.

The most (or only) revelatory scene in Melania showcases this disinterest in full fruition. It is January 6, 2025, after Congress has certified the election results, this time without a mob to interrupt it. The soon-to-be second-term First Lady stands at a window in her apartment office, a glittering New York night behind her. “Hi, Mr. President,” she says, picking up the phone. “Congratulations!”

“Did you watch?” asks an excited Trump.

“I did not, yeah,” she replies, offering no apology or excuse. “I will see it on the news.”

Since January 20, she has rarely been seen at Mar-a-Lago or in Washington; most of the president’s travel, these days, is solo. 

If the film shows us anything, it is that supporting the Melania project is not a cheap undertaking. “Vagina is expensive,” Stern recalls Trump confiding in him at his second wedding, to Marla Maples, in 1997. This is how Trump sees everything: if he wants something—a building, a person, a hemisphere—he should have it, and he will get it at any cost. Asked by the New York Times why he needs to own Greenland, Trump said, “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

He wanted Melania, he got her, and now he owns her. But does he still need her? Certainly, he does not need her for female adulation or loyalty: for that, there’s the coterie of Cabinet members—most prominently, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt—competing to be his best gal. These women will do anything the boss asks of them, from telling blatant lies to torpedoing the institutions of U.S. democracy.

Nor does Trump need Melania’s love, because he doesn’t need anyone’s. Yes, he cares very much what people think of him, and it is therefore gratifying to watch him seethe as his approval numbers slide. But in the end, tyrants don’t trouble themselves with popularity polls. If people don’t consent because they dislike him or his policies, Trump can simply turn up the violence and suppress the dissent—just as he’s doing.

He doesn’t need Melania as a receptacle of his misogyny. For that, there are women reporters to call “piggy” or tell to smile more, while they seethe in silence so as not to lose their press privileges. There are powerful women too, like the then-Swiss president, Karin Keller-Sutter, on whose country he imposed a 39 percent tariff. He’d planned on 30 percent, he later said on Fox, but added 9 percent because he “didn’t like the way she talked to us” on their phone call.

Melania’s stock is literally falling. The day before the 2025 inauguration and two days after a Trump Organization affiliate launched the $TRUMP memecoin, Melania released her own, $MELANIA. It sold that day for around $8.50, soaring to a market cap of $8.5 billion in 24 hours. A year later, her coin is valued at less than 12 cents, a 98 percent depreciation—even though it’s outperforming the rest of the Trump crypto biz and got a bump when the film came out. The only item with her name on it for sale on Trumpstore.com, the Trump Organization’s retail website, is her autobiography, Melania, available for $50. You can get it used on Amazon for $3.36 plus $3.99 shipping.

Melania contributed a $75 million emolument to the Trump presidential enterprise. But he knows as well as we do that the film is a dog. It earned an encouraging $7 million the first weekend, but ticket sales plummeted 67 percent the second weekend and an additional 62 percent the week after. Like President Trump’s base, the First Lady’s fans are passionate in devotion yet limited in number. And perhaps like his, they are diminishing in both.

It’s not that Trump has ever depended on Melania to boost the bottom line. The Trumps, along with a few dozen insiders, cashed out $1.2 billion of crypto before the family’s offerings, including $MELANIA, tanked. Anyway, money is no object when the kitty is constantly refilled by favor-seekers, and you have the U.S. Treasury from which to hand the favors out.

If Trump, as president, has never needed his third wife for private affirmation or public acclamation, for wreaking vengeance or making money, there’s always been something he did rely on her for: his sexual self-esteem. So why has Melania lost her market value today?

In his second term, Trump has undergone an astonishing development: he no longer needs his wife for sex, or even the appearance thereof. Indeed, since Inauguration Day we have witnessed a man who has moved beyond sex entirely. He is an elder statesman, no longer a young buck. He’s let the dyed orange hair go gray. His signature long red tie, once a bright appendage hanging between his legs, has given way to other colors and stripes; draped over his belly, they seem to be creeping up further toward his beltline. His misogyny is still fully on view, but you don’t hear him trading smarmy stories with the likes of Howard Stern anymore. In the film, Donald and Melania hold hands whenever they’re together (was there a codicil prohibiting swatting?). But romance has never been his thing, and now he’s barely pretending. Did he give his wife flowers for Valentine’s Day? a reporter asked the president as he boarded Air Force One. He laughed awkwardly. “I better not tell you that,” he said. “That’s the toughest question.”

This term Trump has seized unprecedented power. And if “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as the physically and politically noxious yet perpetually well-mated Henry Kissinger put it, it is also onanistic Spanish fly. Asked by The Atlantic in April to compare his two terms, Trump replied: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive.” This time, he continued, “I run the country and the world.” For a sociopathic megalomaniac, that’s the equivalent of 8.28 billion blowjobs.

Melania’s leitmotif is the stilettos that stride down gilded staircases and over polished floors, that climb in and out of so many vehicles so many times that the viewer loses count—a pair of four-inch metonyms signifying Melania’s glamour, her physical flawlessness, and perhaps the acrobatic ordeal of performing First Ladyhood. Of course, stilettos are also the metonym of the dominatrix, whose erotic power resides in her hauteur, the emotional distance she assiduously maintains. But power flows both ways in an S&M relationship. The dom’s power is more obvious, but it is the sub’s skillful compliance that supplies the master’s satisfaction. If there was anything interesting about the Trumps’ marriage (and there isn’t much) it was this negotiation. 

But as we’ve seen in his dealing with other countries, Donald Trump is through with bargaining. He does not negotiate, he extorts. And when extortion doesn’t work, he assaults. Trump is the master, and, as he sees it, the world is his slave. His sadism is as boundless and frigid as Greenland. He has unleashed onto the streets thousands of men with handcuffs, zealous to inflict violence upon the bodies of others. His punishments are many, his rewards few.

Stephen Miller, chief strategist of government sadism, summed up the worldview that guides this administration: “We live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The weak, under this ideology, are women and girls, queer and transgender people, and anyone who is vulnerable. For the strong, these people may serve a temporary purpose, but no extraneous resource is to be wasted on them. That is why every state function that might be called feminine—from food stamps to child care to stewardship of the air and water—must be abolished.

There’s no need for pretense anymore: women, even the wife of the most powerful man in the world, are put on earth to be dominated. So take off the stilettos, Melania. Donald J. Trump wields the whip. And there is no safe word.

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