The Future of Melania Trump’s Legacy Is, So Far, Dictated by Her Silence
The Future of Melania Trump’s Legacy Is, So Far, Dictated by Her Silence
Scholars look to Florence Harding and Pat Nixon in considering Melania’s place in history among first ladies.
If past is prologue, it is reasonable to expect that as former First Lady Melania Trump watches her husband, Donald Trump, bide his time until he is formally sentenced in court for his conviction in the hush money trial, her response to the former president’s entanglements will be much the same as it has been: silence.
Some scholars have looked to the recent and distant past of other former first ladies to contemplate Melania Trump’s future, and specifically her legacy.
It’s important to understand that Melania Trump is not the only first lady to navigate the fallout from the transgressions of her husband. However, her husband’s term in office (2016-2020) was unprecedented in many ways. He was the first president to ever be impeached twice. The first time he was accused of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Trump’s political rivals as he withheld security aid approved by Congress. In the second impeachment, Trump was accused of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the election that he had lost. Both cases ended with Trump being acquitted on all counts by the Senate.
Three-plus years out of the White House, Melania Trump now is navigating another set of unprecedented circumstances as the spouse of a former president of the United States. On May 30, Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony; he was found guilty in a Manhattan court on all 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn actor who said they had a sexual relationship. The sentencing date is set for July 11, just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump is expected to become the presidential nominee to run against President Joe Biden in the November election. Beyond that, Donald Trump faces felony charges in another state court and in two different federal districts.
Melania Trump is the fourth first lady to chart a path forward though her husband’s impeachments. She’s in the company of former First Ladies Hillary Clinton, Pat Nixon and Eliza Johnson. It’s unknown how much her husband’s conviction and impeachments will overshadow the former first lady’s initiatives that included “Be Best,” which advocated for issues impacting the lives of children with a particular focus on healthy online habits, cyber bullying, and people experiencing opioid misuse. She also contributed to the preservation of the White House grounds.
The New York conviction, however, sets Melania Trump’s legacy apart. Scholars Katherine A.S. Sibley and Diana B. Carlin, who specialize in first ladies, have taken into account the actions of former First Ladies Pat Nixon and Florence Harding after their husbands’ mired presidencies in considering how Melania can protect her own legacy.
Melania Trump, like Florence Harding, had to deal with Congressional investigations into wrongdoing during her husband’s administration, Sibley, a professor of history and director of American Studies at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, told East Wing Magazine in an email. Florence Harding had to deal with the Teapot Dome scandal beginning in 1922 while her husband was still in office and, later in 1924, the investigation of President Warren Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty after the president unexpectedly died in 1923.
Florence Harding died of kidney failure within 15 months of her husband’s death.
“Before she died, though, Florence worked hard to shape her husband’s legacy,” says Sibley, author of First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy, noting she tried to find the proper biographer and then hoped to write a book herself. But by doing so, Sibley says, it prevented the publication of works that might have been more favorable to her husband. Furthermore, she was never able to finish her own book.
Given Florence Harding’s short remaining life and her illness, Sibley says it’s unclear if she did much to address her own legacy. As first lady, she was known for reopening the White House and its grounds to the public for the first time since World War I and regularly hosting receptions and photo opportunities. She also advocated for animal rights, veterans’ welfare and women’s equality.
Both women, Sibley says, share the painful experience of being aware of their husbands’ infidelity, and both chose not to discuss it publicly.
“Florence did want very much to shape her husband’s legacy despite the ongoing investigations,” Sibley says. “Melania, whose husband is still very much alive, has not shown any apparent effort to shape his legacy despite even more negative press. If anything, she seems to have distanced herself from him during the New York deliberations and has been nearly absent from his re-election campaign.”
“Melania, whose husband is still very much alive, has not shown any apparent effort to shape his legacy despite even more negative press. If anything, she seems to have distanced herself from him during the New York deliberations and has been nearly absent from his re-election campaign.”
— Katherine A.S. Sibley
Indeed, Melania Trump has guarded her privacy and has rarely commented on the chaos surrounding her husband, especially when it has personal implications for her, Political Communication Scholar Diana B.Carlin said in an email.
Much of Melania Trump’s legacy as first lady is her demonstration of the role's flexibility absent any formal dictates regarding public appearances or statements, notes Carlin, co-author of Remember the First Ladies: The Legacies of America’s History-Making Women.
“Her silence and lack of visibility the past few weeks speaks volumes about her determination to maintain privacy for herself and her son [Barron] in the midst of a trial that made the personal political,” says Carlin, professor emerita of communication at Saint Louis University.
The closest modern-day comparison to Melania Trump is former First Lady Pat Nixon. Her husband, former President Richard Nixon, was subject to an investigation into a 1972 burglary into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. It exposed a trail of abuses that eventually led back to Richard Nixon. On the evening of Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation and resigned. A month later, newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.
“After Watergate, Pat Nixon—who was an activist first lady and experienced the only presidential resignation—showed grace in not commenting and returning to private life,” Carlin says. “Melania does not have the option to disappear, but she can and likely will do what is necessary to assist her husband as she did in 2016 after the Access Hollywood tapes when the time is right for her. This is not the time.”
Decades later, a future first lady in Melania Trump would add to the legacy of former First Lady Pat Nixon. Pat Nixon “championed the lives of the underprivileged, the sick and the forgotten,” Melania Trump said in a letter for an event honoring Pat Nixon at the University of Southern California, marking 80 years since she graduated cum laude from the college, according to a 2019 op-ed written by Anita McBride, who served as former chief of staff to former First Lady Laura Bush and is the director of American University’s First Ladies Initiative. In the letter, Melania Trump calls Pat Nixon a “true role model” as first lady who is “worthy of our admiration and remembrance.”
Pat Nixon was known for her support for women’s rights, traveling internationally as the president’s personal representative and with her White House restoration efforts made the White House more open and accessible than ever before, as described in Remember the First Ladies: The Legacies of America’s History-Making Women.
With so many legal outcomes pending and the outcome of the 2024 election months away, it seems only time will tell. But when it comes to time, Sibley offers this:
“If, as I suspect, Melania is not compelled to shape her husband’s legacy, she has already had more time than Florence to shape her own,” Sibley says. “What she could learn from Florence is not to wait too long.”