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One thing the Melania documentary is not is a documentary, at least in the traditional journalistic understanding of the genre. There is no backstory, no interviews with friends or family that might help you understand the main character better, and scant introspection—deep or shallow—from the subject herself. The film follows Melania Trump through the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration, hitting the same highlights you’d expect in a “Get ready with me” wedding video. She is seen approving invitations, trying on her dress, and, at one point, approving an appetizer that consists of caviar stuffed into a literal golden egg. Occasionally she interacts with staff, her husband, a foreign first lady, but mostly she is alone, even when tepidly doing the YMCA dance.
So what even is Melania? Is it, as critics have suggested, a mockumentary, propaganda, the “hard launch of a new lifestyle brand?” Or, as the Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert suggests, is it something more akin to a “a two-hour perfume commercial”? The film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center, featuring vastly more government officials than celebrities, implies another possibility. Maybe this can be classified as one of President Trump’s attempts to show the world what he wants American culture to be: glitzy, fabulous—more Les Mis, less Hamilton, as he suggested on one of his recent tours of the Kennedy Center.
Another of Gilbert’s descriptors is perhaps the most apt: “Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket,” she wrote, considering that Amazon, which has many business dealings with the government, licensed it for $40 million, far above the next highest bid. Amazon reps have insisted the company invested so heavily in the film because they “think customers are going to love it.” In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Gilbert about the movie, about the real Melania, and about President Trump’s efforts to shape culture.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: The Melania movie follows the first lady for 20 days leading up to the inauguration. It shows her trying on her dress, reviewing invitations, getting in and out of planes, meeting with other first ladies, trying the dress on again. She looks absolutely flawless in every shot, from glossy waves to Louboutins.
It’s called a documentary, but that’s a real stretch.
Sophie Gilbert: It’s much more in the vein of a commercial. When you think documentary, you think a sort of journalistic endeavor or a real portrait of someone or something. But this is entirely, entirely Melania Trump–approved.
It really felt to me like a two-hour perfume commercial.
Rosin: That is staff writer Sophie Gilbert, who saw the movie in London. I, by the way, saw it in Northern Virginia, and many of the 25 or so people in the theater with me seemed into it, just for the record.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. In her review of the movie, Sophie wrote, “The movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket.”
Amazon paid $40 million to license the film and another $35 million on marketing. Their reps said they invested so much because “we think customers are going to love it.”
Maybe. But bidding well over double the next-highest offer suggests that you might be paying for more than just the movie.
Gilbert: It definitely feels like Amazon was paying way, way, way over the odds for a documentary, not because they believe that this would be a work of cinematic genius, the like of which none of us have ever seen, but because they wanted to keep [Donald] Trump happy and on the side of Amazon in case that happened to be useful.
Rosin: Sophie, welcome to the show.
Gilbert: Hi! Thank you so much for having me.
Rosin: So we don’t know when this movie will come to streaming, so I think we need to describe it for our audience. What happens in this movie? What’s its narrative structure?
Gilbert: I think I can start by saying not much happens. (Laughs.) It’s about an hour, 45, I wanna say, and usually, with documentaries, there’s some kind of dramatic crux. There’s a structure to it. There’s a narrative arc. There is not in this movie.
The first shot, it’s sort of astonishing ’cause you go and you really don’t know what to expect. I went in cold—no reviews were out. Nothing had been written about Melania by this point. And there’s this Rolling Stones (Laughs.) “Gimme Shelter” needle drop. And then you see drone footage of Mar-a-Lago.
It does not look like a documentary. It’s so expensively shot. The visuals are high, high, high quality. And then I think the first shot of Melania is a pair of red Christian Louboutin heels, thousand-dollar shoes, and the camera kind of pans up, and you see her like she’s a massive celebrity, which she is, but it’s really like Beyoncé kind of setup and framing.
I’ve, for my sins, have read a lot of books about Melania Trump by this point, so I do feel like I have a kind of a sense of who she is, and none of that comes through in this movie. It is entirely visuals. She looks absolutely stunning. Her clothes are amazing.
They film her walking from place to place. She’s always walking. She’s always wearing heels. I think right at the end of the movie, she takes her heels off for a second, but otherwise, she’s in five-inch stilettos pretty much the whole way through.
But there’s no sense at all of who she is. She speaks in all these aphorisms about living life with purpose and how ardently she believes in the Constitution and these very weird sound bites that come through that have nothing to do with what’s happening on-screen or what her husband, certainly, is doing as president.
Rosin: So what were some of the big scenes that stuck with you? Because (Laughs.) I feel like anyone listening is gonna have an odd, disjointed view. They’re literally not gonna understand what is happening. Is she just walking from place to place during this movie?
Gilbert: Yeah, it’s about as boring as that sounds, actually. (Laughs.) I wrote my notes—she begins at Mar-a-Lago boarding a plane. She goes to New York. She gets fitted for her inauguration clothes.
Brett Ratner is the director, and we can get into him for a moment later. (Laughs.) But you can see him desperate for action and for drama, because there’s a scene where a costume assistant has to try and cut her blouse with scissors, and their hand is sort of trembling with fear.
From there, she goes to Washington. She goes to Jimmy Carter’s funeral. She goes to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and talks a little bit about losing her mother. She goes back to Washington, back to Mar-a-Lago. There’s the inauguration; she goes to three balls.
That’s it. That’s really all there is.
Rosin: Having not read her biography, I have to say I did learn some things. I’m not sure I learned directly some things in the way that you would if somebody sat down and interviewed someone, but I did learn—she was alone so much of the time—at least things that made me think. Like, Why is there no one else in this picture?
I learned about her fashion sense. She’s essentially wearing menswear a lot of the time, and black and white. I found that to be very interesting. Her interest is not fashion, per se, at least in this administration; it’s tailoring, which is different.
Gilbert: Yeah. Kate Bennett wrote a book called Free, Melania, and she wrote up her theory, which is that whenever Melania Trump is annoyed at Donald, she dresses in menswear because he prefers this very feminine aesthetic of dresses and pink and women being extra feminine. So Kate Bennett writes about how, in 2018, the year that the Stormy Daniels scandal came out, Melania wore a lot of tailoring. (Laughs.) There were a lot of suits, a lot of pinstripe that year. So I found that interesting in the context of this movie, where she is, again, wearing quite formal, quite tailored masculine clothing.
But, no, I think the things that were fascinating about this movie, maybe fascinating is the wrong word, mildly interesting—
Rosin: (Laughs.) Give her that.
Gilbert: —you see how much she exists in this bubble, and it seems to be a real bubble that, I would say, is probably one that many famous and ultrarich and ultra-privileged people live in, where there’s no friction.
She walks smoothly through these liminal spaces: She’s at the airport boarding the plane, and she’s in a hallway, she’s in a freight elevator with Secret Service. She gets in a car; there’s no traffic because they’ve cleared the roads. And she goes to St. Patrick’s Cathedral; they’ve cleared all the people out so that she can go in privately. It’s this very smooth, curated, manufactured reality, I think, where nothing annoys her; nothing really gets in her way. She’s just sort of moving from place to place without anyone.
There are no friends. She has sort of supplicants—she has her trusted wardrobe designers and the people designing the themes for the balls, the events planners—and everyone is very deferential to her, and it doesn’t seem that sincere a relationship. Maybe it is when the cameras are off.
But you don’t even see her have a conversation with her son. (Laughs.) You see Barron, but he doesn’t speak in the movie. They don’t have any interaction. She has a few scenes with Donald, and that was interesting to me, is how Melania seems to be the only person in the world that Donald can stand sharing the limelight with. We know that he is very much (Laughs.) an enjoyer of attention, and yet, when Melania is the focus, it doesn’t seem to bother him. He seems proud. He seems sort of genuinely enthralled by her in a way that I was not quite expecting.
Rosin: That’s so interesting because what struck me was a little bit the opposite of that, which is the nature of their conversations, the tone they use to talk to each other. That’s what’s really stuck in my brain.
The first time we actually hear Trump’s voice is when he calls her on the phone.
[Phone rings]
Melania Trump: Hi, Mr. President. Congratulations!
Donald Trump: Did you watch it?
Gilbert: Yes. She is in New York, and he’s in Washington. The votes have just been ratified, and he is officially president-elect. And she’s like, Oh, please stop talking. (Laughs.)
Rosin: (Laughs.) She hasn’t even seen it.
Gilbert: She’s like, Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. (Laughs.)
Rosin: And he starts talking to her literally exactly like he talks to us, the American people. He’s like (Imitates Donald Trump’s voice.) It’s the best thing that’s ever happened. It’s the biggest victory ever—
Gilbert: (Speaks simultaneously and imitates Trump’s voice.) The biggest victory ever. Yep.
Rosin: Yes, exactly. (Laughs.)
Gilbert: (Imitates Trump’s voice.) Numbers they’ve never seen before.
Rosin: Never seen—but he’s talking to his wife.
Gilbert: I know.
There’s also the scene where they’re dancing at the inaugural ball, this very staged moment where she is supposed to, I think, perform adoration, and she can’t do it. She seems like she can’t wait for him to stop touching her. She’s leaning away from him as far back as she can. The body language, I think, speaks (Laughs.) possibly more in that scene than Melania does.
Rosin: You had the absolutely most brilliant insight about her inauguration dress, which was a white dress with black ribbons—we’ll say ribbons. It’s an incredibly constructed dress. They do talk about it a lot, how it has no seams showing. (Laughs.)
Gilbert: Yeah. You can’t see the seams; it’s just like Melania. (Laughs.)
Rosin: I’m gonna make you repeat your line because it was so good.
Gilbert: Well, it was all I could think of when I saw it now. She has this white dress with these stark black lines across it, and looking at it now, from the context of 2026, it just looks like the redacted Epstein files. (Laughs.)
Rosin: I think anybody seeing this film will never see anything but that. Again, it’s exactly what it looks like: redaction ink. It’s amazing.
Gilbert: Her style—again, her colors are black and white. (Laughs.) I think that by itself is interesting when we’re thinking about First Ladies and how pastel they often are and how Michelle Obama always famously had to wear a lot of sort of J.Crew tea dresses and things like that.
Melania, she’s black and white. She’s not worried about trying to perform a version of herself that she doesn’t feel connected to.
Rosin: Another great moment, and this one you can help me read. Actually, this was my favorite moment in the movie, when I felt like there was a peek of Melania, she felt sort of grounded to me, is when she, towards the end—they’ve done the dance, they’ve gone through the inauguration party, and she looks straight at the camera, and she says, “Here we go again.” How did you read that?
Gilbert: I read it as made for the trailer, which is exactly (Laughs.) where it ended up.
[Music from Melania trailer plays]
Melania Trump: Here we go again.
Gilbert: It’s really funny because there’s a moment at the beginning of the movie too where she says, “Everyone wants to know, so here it is: family, business, philanthropy, and becoming first lady of the United States—again.” And the “again” is so classic ’80s sitcom, like: Record scratch. Freeze-frame. Here’s how I ended up here. (Laughs.)
But all the things that she’s promising do not come through at all in the movie. There’s no sense of family. There’s no sense of philanthropy. There’s very little about business. You do see her becoming first lady of the United States a little bit.
It’s sort of funny. It’s like there are these moments almost where you see what it could have been if it were a real documentary and not this sort of brochurelike version of Melania.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break: how Melania Trump’s film fits into Donald Trump’s America.
[Break]
Rosin: So the movie premiered at the Kennedy Center. There was no mainstream press there, just administration officials and tech people. And then, shortly after that, Trump announced he was closing the Kennedy Center for this two-year renovation, to build what he called a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex.” In your head, are these two events connected?
Gilbert: God, it’s more representative to me, I think, of so much that Trump touches seems to die. (Laughs.) I’m thinking about his career running casinos in New Jersey and all his multiple bankruptcies.
He famously took over the Kennedy Center—which was renovated, by the way, in 2019; it’s not that desperately in need of a makeover. (Laughs.) He put his name on the Kennedy Center, and immediately, artists have refused to perform there; they’ve dropped out. The Washington National Opera has removed itself from the Kennedy Center. There’s this real sort of rush to flee. And as a result, I think, it’s probably hemorrhaging money, and Trump is now closing it for two years.
But I think what was interesting about the premiere was who wasn’t there. And really, when you think about who attended, there weren’t any mainstream celebrities other than Nicki Minaj—Nicki Minaj, who, recently, I think, has been tweeting during the Grammys about the musicians who were involved in satanic cults. (Laughs.) So that was their big mainstream cultural figure who they could get to come along. And I’m not sure that it demonstrates the sort of clout in culture’s world, at least, that they were hoping to show.
Rosin: It is the Trump administration’s open wish to control the culture, and then there’s the sort of two possibilities of it.
I was thinking, on the one hand, I have read about days when there were state-run television, where you’d have ballets and operas about great administration triumphs, and there would be Melania films every day, and we could all go see them. That is a world we’ve read about in history, and it did feel to me like that, like some weird authoritarian future of culture.
On the other hand, like you said, it felt kind of sad. There is no state-run television—in a world of infinite sources of entertainment, that’s impossible—and so it just feels a little like failure and a way for rich donors to curry favor. It’s hard to see how it’s gonna take off. It’s both scary but also seems maybe not possible.
Gilbert: Yeah. Our colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote a really good piece about this recently and about how Trump is desperate to control culture, to put his stamp on it, to have his word be law, and to be in charge of what happens. And he famously loves music and DJs at Mar-a-Lago from his iPad.
But what he can’t control, Spencer argued, was what people actually want. He can’t manage to be the person who controls public taste. And I think that’s the thing that Melania is butting up against.
And from what I can tell, the audience who’s going to see it, they have been very divided along party lines. The idea that this would be a film with mainstream appeal, I think, it’s not happening.
Rosin: I guess the mid possibility is that it’s propaganda that works some of the time. Like, okay, we can discuss this around the Melania film and immigration.
Gilbert: Mm.
Rosin: The film was coming out around the time of the Minneapolis shootings and the sort of mayhem in Minneapolis and the tragedy there. Melania is maybe the most famous immigrant in the U.S. right now.
And would you agree that immigration came up a lot—like, the theme of immigration was there?
Gilbert: It came up in the movie, but not in a meaningful way. It was fascinating ’cause there were all these moments in the film where Melania would say things that sounded nice but were completely at odds with things that her husband is doing and really sort of crumble under any gentle prodding or—not even interrogation.
But there’s sort of no deeper analysis of that in the movie. So she does have this scene with the White House interior designer, who is an immigrant from Laos, who says, You and I were the American dream, or something like that, and the moment doesn’t even really land because you’re not allowed to consider what it means that these people are decorating the White House that Trump will live in while he is also staging mass deportations of immigrants. There’s none of that tension.
And so all these moments, they felt very strange to me because—and none of it makes sense. It’s all in conflict with what we know if we’re following politics in this moment. But the director of the movie does absolutely nothing to sort of dig at that tension in an interesting way.
Rosin: The director, Brett Ratner, tell us about that.
Gilbert: Brett Ratner is a Hollywood film director. He is best known for the Rush Hour franchise. He makes action movies, these sort of big blockbusters, tentpole films.
In 2017, during the outpouring of sort of allegations and accusations that came out during what we now call the #MeToo movement, Brett Ratner was alleged to have harassed and sexually assaulted half a dozen women, some of them very famous women. The actresses Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge were among the women who came out with accusations against Brett Ratner.
And he denied them all but has not made a film since. And so Melania is his return to filmmaking. It’s definitely not the kind of product that I think he would be making if he had his druthers, but the Trumps seemed to have seen no problem with giving him this assignment. Trump is supposedly a very big fan of the Rush Hour franchise and is hoping for a new installment.
Rosin: Is there something explicit, like Melania’s jacket? What did her jacket say? I don’t care?
Gilbert: I really don’t care.
Rosin: I really don’t care, do u? Is that explicit? Or is it just Donald Trump likes the Rush Hour franchise, and they’re not really thinking about it?
Gilbert: Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who worked with Melania, has also written a book about her, called Melania and Me, and she wrote in that book that Melania doesn’t do shame. She’s not sentimental, and she won’t be forced to feel something that she doesn’t feel. And so I really do think, when it comes to moral quandaries like this, she won’t perform something that she doesn’t feel, if that makes sense.
And so in terms of Brett Ratner being a friend of the family—he’s moved in the same circles as Trump for a long time. I think he has a place in Florida.
I can understand why he took this job; I’m sure I would be desperate to work again too. But it’s a strange project for him to take, and I think, as we see in the movie, it’s definitely not his natural talent.
Rosin: Yeah, I did wonder if there could have been a version of this movie that had more robust alternate storytelling—like, there is an airbrushed version of Melania’s life story that is rich and interesting. I have no idea if it’s true.
But it was interesting to me that they chose no backstory. There was no pictures of her in Slovenia, no pictures of her as a young child, as a model. The “immigrant makes good” storyline was not present at all and, I thought, would be kind of interesting, even if not fact-checkable.
Gilbert: Yeah, no, I do think her story is a fascinating one. But again, it’s hard to tell how much of what she says is actually reflective of what actually happened.
I think during Melania the movie, she talks about her mother as a fashion designer, which is slightly, I think, overplaying her mother’s actual job; she was a patternmaker in state-owned children’s clothing factory in Slovenia.
So there’s sort of the story that she tells, which is, Trump often describes her as a supermodel—there’s this idea that she had this flourishing modeling career. But in reality, I think she had this very ’80s aesthetic during the ’90s as a model, and she didn’t quite fit during the fashion moment, so a lot of the ads that she got were commercials or she did an ad for Camel cigarettes. She definitely worked as a model, but the idea that she was up there with the Kate Mosses and the Naomi Campbells at the time is definitely not true.
But even in a deep-dive analysis of the superficial aspects that she presents—that’s why I find the fashion thing so fascinating, the idea that she wears men’s tailoring when she’s angry at her husband. (Laughs.) She gives us so little, but there is definitely fodder to dig into in a more thorough and curious way. But I think that’s not what Melania the film is about.
Rosin: So the movie ends—do you remember how it ends—by emphasizing her remaking the role of first lady.
Gilbert: Yes, her peace letter to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yes. (Laughs.) This part is interesting ’cause it’s entirely in text; there’s nothing to look at. It’s just text on the screen, and it’s a lot of text. It’s like reading a sort of AI summary of My Accomplishments. But the accomplishments are very much in line with past first ladies.
Gilbert: Yeah. But it’s funny too because I think they realize by the end of the movie that they really have given us nothing. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.)
Gilbert: So there’s this rush to kind of unfurl actual accomplishments. But it’s funny too because there’s a scene in the film where she talks about her accomplishments as first lady. She’s like, Oh, I renovated the Rose Garden, which her husband turned into a patio. (Laughs.) She talks about working in the East Wing, which her husband turned into a pile of rubble. There’s all these moments where she sort of very happily talks about things that she’s done, but there’s no acknowledgment of where they stand now.
And so you do have this sort of wall of text at the end saying that she’s worked for children in the foster-care community, and she’s rallied on behalf of the Take It Down Act, which is involving pictures online, and this peace letter to Putin, which I did not know about (Laughs.)and, obviously, I don’t think it really has worked if the goal was managing peace between Russia and Ukraine, but sort of questionable accomplishments. But it does seem to reflect a small amount of panic from the filmmaker regarding what he’s actually been able to tell us.
Rosin: So often, when we talk about first ladies, they are a marker for gender and feminism in the U.S. at that moment, what we take away from it. Thinking in those terms, since you’re somebody who does think in those terms, what do you take away from this movie? Is it the act of ultimate control by a first lady over her own image? Is it retrograde? How do you read it?
Gilbert: It feels to me like an extension of what so many people do on Instagram now, which is curate their own reality and curate their own sense of self in a way that is very controlled and very intentional but also very flat and often not that fun to engage with.
But in terms of femininity at the moment, I do find that fascinating because I would say so much of femininity in this moment, and especially in conservative circles, is about this kind of weaponized performance of not just femininity, but also wealth, this very obvious work that people are willing to put in to look the right way, to sort of perform in a way that Trump might find pleasing.
That is very of this moment. And certainly, the unabashed performance of wealth, I think, is something that we have become very used to online and may be getting sick of right now? I personally feel sick of it, but maybe I’m the only one.
Rosin: Well, Sophie, thank you so much for talking through this movie, both as an actual movie and as an object in the culture and what it might mean. I appreciate it.
Gilbert: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Rob Smierciak engineered and composed original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post The Meaning of Melania appeared first on The Atlantic.
