Il mondo di Trump

The Republican Convention

"Where is Melania?" The former first lady reappears next to Trump

The former first lady after the assassination attempt reconnected with her husband with a message of closeness. And she will be at his side for the third nomination

17 July 2024

3' min read

The former first lady Melania Trump is expected to attend theRepublican Convention on Thursday 17 July, when Trump will formally accept the presidential nomination: a senior official of Trump's campaign told Nbc News. However, it is not ruled out that she may appear even earlier. For the former first lady it is the third appearance at a Republican convention alongside her husband in his nomination acceptance speech, after 2016 and 2020.

Already at the end of the Trump presidency, from 2019, Melania had decided not to live in the White House, but in a secret location in Virginia next to her son Baron. According to many observers, relations between the two have long since cooled, to an unofficial but de facto separation. The assassination attempt on her husband and her candidacy may have changed things in the last few hours.

In March, Melania had preferred not to respond to the media asking if she would campaign for her husband. In April, she had never shown up next to her husband in court at the hearings in New York federal court that led to the tycoon's conviction in the Stormy Daniels case. Melania always silent, always one step behind her husband.

So much so that the New York Post, a conservative newspaper, headlined after the first day of the Gop convention "Where's Melania?" to highlight the former first lady's absence at Donald Trump's inaugural address, the former president's first public appearance since last Saturday's assassination attempt.

Trump, with a conspicuous band-aid over his injured ear, entered the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on Monday evening, in front of delirious supporters cheering and chanting 'fight', the word Trump chanted several times as he was carried off the stage with a bloodied face, amidst the applause and enthusiastic greetings of supporters, accompanied by, among others, his children Donald Jr, Eric and Tiffany.

A context in which the absence of Melania and her son Barron, the tycoon's 18-year-old youngest son, was therefore conspicuous. Also absent was his daughter Ivanka who, after having played a leading role with her husband Jared Kusher in her father's first administration, has taken a clear step back from politics since leaving the White House in 2021.

Melania is not scheduled to speak at the convention, although Trump's staff assure that she will attend the event, which ends on Thursday. However, the fact that she is not scheduled to speak is a departure from the decades-long tradition of having the wives of Republican White House candidates speak at the convention.

The former Slovenian model Melania Knavs, born in 1970, married Trump in her third marriage in 2005, and kept this tradition in the 2016 and 2020 conventions. Since then, however, once she left the White House, Melania, who even as first lady had preferred to indulge in the bare minimum of public appearances, has avoided attending any political events, without presiding over any of her husband's rallies.

The absence on the first night of the Republican Convention was particularly striking because last Sunday, a few hours after the attempted assassination of her husband, Melania had issued a rare and heartfelt statement in which she urged people to 'remember that every politician is a man and a woman with a family that loves them'. And she also said that seeing the images of the shooting, she realised that her life and Barron's 'were on the verge of being tragically devastated'.

After the attack, Melania (or her staff) also wrote a letter to the delegates of the Republican Convention, a 'message of hope and good wishes', that out of what happened in Butler something new may be born again for the United States: 'A new dawn has come', she writes. And then he speaks of respect, family and love four times over. As if to say, that the role of first lady candidate in the run-up to the election would already be redefined in a different way following Saturday's attack.