Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

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But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

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You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.

Or maybe that’s just me. Despite her many years in the public eye as elite arm candy, including her four years as first lady, we still don’t really know who she is. In 2012, Melania tweeted a photo of a Beluga whale with the question, “what is she thinking?” Twelve years on, it is still difficult to ascertain. Years of relentless press scrutiny and a new memoir have supplied us only with hints. This impenetrability is part of what makes her such a perfect site for our projections. We see what we want to see.

Liberals love to hate her. She has been mocked for her accent, for being multilingual, and has been the victim of xenophobia and sexist barbs. “I can say ‘anal costs extra’ in six languages,” was one viral meme. News that she was going to make changes to the White House rose garden in 2020 was met with a xenophobic tweet storm by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, expressing fury that a “foreigner” had “the audacity to … pull up history dating back a lifetime…These trashy, evil, stupid people need to get out of our house. What GALL she has.” American comedian Rosie O’Donnell has tweeted a video suggesting that Melania’s beloved only son, Barron, had autism. And feminists described her delightedly as “the only first lady to pose naked”. With Melania, the rigid dictates about how we use language to talk about identity no longer apply. We can say what we like.

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Now Melania is returning to the White House, and she is already signalling that she’ll be charting an independent course. She has refused the traditional tea meeting with outgoing First Lady, Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s alleged role in the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. And she is not the least bit approachable, unlike Michelle Obama who did folksy Q&As on Vine, or Jill Biden, who once tweeted “you can take the girl out of Philly” after physically blocking protesters with her own body, prompting Vox to applaud her “relatable toughness”. Melania is restrained and unknowable — a cipher in an era of garish American confessionalism.

Admittedly, her protectiveness is hard-earned. A former friend, confidante and advisor, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, recorded their private conversations and wrote a tell-all book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of my Friendship with the First Lady. Most salaciously, the book details the tensions between Melania and her daughter-in-law, Ivanka. Wolkoff describes her efforts to sideline Ivanka at the inauguration and keep her out of official portraits, while Melania privately refers to her daughter-in-law as “Princess”.

The announcement of her memoir, Melania, was treated as yet another violation of decorum, a departure from sanctified democratic tradition, and therefore suspect. Her patriotic immigrant story, a fairy tale about becoming American, was described as a last-ditch cash grab before the election: another tawdry consumer item for sale alongside the Trump coins, the trading cards, and the $100,000 Trump Victory Tourbillion watch. (There is also an 18K “First Lady” watch in rose gold, which retails for a more modest sum of $799). But while the Trumps’ tacky profiteering is undeniable, she was hardly the First Lady to monetise her position. Michelle Obama’s own memoir, Becoming, received a soft-focus rock star treatment: it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and was accompanied by a stadium tour and soundtrack by Questlove. In 2018, the Obamas signed a multi-year deal with Netflix, a corporate partnership that was never subjected to similar criticism by the liberal commentariat.

Melania was born in 1970 in Slovenia, the wealthiest republic of what was then socialist Yugoslavia. She describes an idyllic life full of foreign travel, sports cars, and fashion — hardly the drab, walled-off hell of many Cold War propagandists’ fantasies. Her upbringing in the republic of Slovenia during the Seventies and Eighties was happy, she insists; she wanted for nothing. Young Melania Knaus ran on the cobblestone streets of the UNESCO World Heritage city Dubrovnik in Croatia; she went shopping in Italy, and walked in her mother’s fashion shows in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. She is therefore very much a child of the socialism of leader Josip Broz Tito, himself a lover of luxury cars, yachts, and fine cigars. Tito also cultivated an image of elite glamour.

Around the time of Melania’s birth, Tito was photographed driving Sophia Loren around in a golf cart and hosting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the Croatian coast. An entry from Burton’s diary in 1971 notes that Tito and his wife lived in “remarkable luxury unmatched by anything else I’ve seen”. The very next year, bronzed Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione opened the opulent Penthouse Adriatic Club on the Croatian island of Krk, which included a luxury hotel and casino, and was staffed by female “pets” in skimpy French maid uniforms. There were even rumours that one of the swimming pools was filled with champagne. When it flopped and closed the very next year, Guccione attempted a similarly inspired hotel and casino project in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But misfortune struck again and he ran out of money. The project was soon rescued by none other than Donald Trump, who purchased the half-finished Guccione property, opening the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in 1984. Melania’s image can therefore easily be situated within the Yugoslav tradition, and she herself can be seen as an extension of the golden age of Seventies Titoist luxury and glamour.

But nothing in the book answers the question always lurking: “What is she thinking?” Written in superficial, thank you-note politesse, Melania, in typical fashion, recedes from view. The delivers the stiff immigrant narrative, light on personal details but heavy on easy moralising. “Life’s circumstances shape you in many ways, often entirely beyond your control,” she writes. “Your birth, parental influences, and the world in which you grow up. As an adult, there comes a moment when you become solely responsible for the life you lead. You must take charge, embrace that responsibility, and become the architect of your own future.”

It is standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps fare, Americana imbued with the usual veneration of hard work and self-reliance. But Melania is aligning herself with a particular kind of immigrant, the kind that is part of her husband’s flock: the “good”, Trump-supporting foreigner who is patriotic, embraces American values, and does not feel victimised by their adopted country. In Melania’s world, we can surmise, immigrants of her kind stand in contrast to those who resent their country, reject its values, and call it racist. The latter see structural racism and xenophobia as the forces that have ultimately shaped their lives: responsibility is mostly external to oneself. In contrast, for the Trumpian immigrant, responsibility lies within. Despite years of Democratic Party courting, the recent presidential election has made clear that a great number of foreign-born Americans now identify more closely with Melania’s immigration narrative.

While she takes great care to depict her early years in sunny terms, there are indications that all was not easy. “As a child, I was somewhat shielded from the darker aspects of the system, but its presence loomed in the back of our minds,” she says. We know from other sources that her father, Viktor Knavs, was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and appears in the police files of UDBA, the Directorate for State Security. Identified as a travelling salesman. He is thought to have violated Yugoslavia’s criminal code, supposedly through tax evasion. Though some American have suggested that Knavs should have been denied US citizenship on the basis of the alleged criminal record, it is possible that UDBA’s interest in Knavs was purely political. As someone who frequently travelled abroad and owned a fleet of cars, Knavs would have likely drawn the attention of the Yugoslav authorities.

None of that is interrogated in her glossy and unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of Yugoslavia in in the last decades before the country began to fall apart. Her story is as sleek and immaculate as the woman herself. And yet, the tiny Alpine country of just over two million has a complex relationship with its native daughter. “The Melania effect” boosted tourism to Slovenia when the Trumps were last in the White House, and Balkan media is already anticipating renewed interest in the country, with enterprising restaurants and artisans already mass producing Melania-themed dishes and products. But not everyone is happy: in 2019, a wood carving of Melania was erected in Rozno, in south-eastern Slovenia, not far from her hometown of Sevnica. A year later, the wooden carving was burned in a “politically motivated” arson attack, and swiftly replaced with a more durable bronze statue in September 2020.

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Back in her adopted country, the attitude is similarly mixed. The continued fascination with her is rooted in her stubborn adherence to traditional modes of gender expression, and her total disinterest in the current imperative of female emancipation. In Melania, she doubles down on her utter fidelity to her wifely duties –infidelities go unmentioned – and to her motherly obligations, her “protection” of Barron first and foremost. She presents, with echoes of Jackie O and Diana, as the betrayed but faithful wife, the princess trapped in a tower, the fiercely devoted mother. She is playing a role of exaggerated femininity, which, in an era of diminished sexual dimorphism in the West, seems almost drag-like.

When asked, in 1999, the year after they first met, if she could picture herself as first lady one day, she demurred: “I would be very traditional, like Jackie Kennedy.” And she was ready to abandon her modelling career in the event that Trump ever became president. “I would stand by him,” she insists, true to form. During a 2005 interview on Larry King Live as newlyweds, Trump claimed that they’d never had a single fight, calling Melania “the rock”. In that interview, she admitted that to be with a man like Donald, “you have to know who you are” and “be smart and strong”. Both insist that theirs is a relationship of equals. But as with other aspects of Melania’s life, much about their marriage — her feelings about her husband’s infidelities, for one — remains an enigma.

It’s easy for women to paint their own opinions on to this blank canvas. A certain cohort are determined that she is the powerless victim of her husband and his politics. The princess in the tower of so many fairy tales, beautiful and trapped. The “free Melania” mania of the first Trump administration, speaks to this inability to understand why she might have chosen to be with this “monster’. And yet, there is very little evidence that Melania is dreaming of freedom. In fact, her memoir offers a glimpse of a very different side of Melania. After the Trumps have left the White House, the FBI raids their home in Mar-a-Lago, and Melania describes a sense of violation. Here her narrative shifts from a studious avoidance of victimisation rhetoric to one of victimhood. After taking so much care to reiterate the need to take responsibility for one’s life, one’s choices, and one’s destiny, she embraces the role of the embittered, wronged victim. Blame is never hers or her husband’s; it is assigned untrustworthy assistants, chiefs of staff, speechwriters, political opponents, and the liberal media. We even get the sense that her much-maligned anti-cyberbullying initiative, Be Best, is actually about herself.

And yet, in other moments, Melania appears sincere. Certainly when she’s talking about “a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health”, which she did in her book. The revelation that Melania is pro-choice came a few weeks before the election, when the Democrats were attempting to use the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-abortion stance as a means of cajoling the undecided or uninspired into voting for them. Whether she was being used to appeal to women voters, or if she was sincere, it’s hard to tell. Inevitably, feminist activists refused to take it at face value. “They’re not embracing it at all,” she said in an interview shortly after her book came out. “They’re saying it was a scam, that it was a lie.”This, then, is the price you pay for being unknowable. Everyone simply believes what they want.

Melania shrugs it all off. And her public statements since her husband’s victory have emphasised unity. “I anticipate the citizens of our nation rejoining in commitment to each other and rising above ideology for the sake of individual liberty, economic prosperity, and security,” she wrote on November 7. In her first post-election interview on Fox & Friends last week, Melania dismissed the importance of Vogue covers and flattering press coverage. “We have more important things to do,” she says. Perhaps she has fooled us all. Perhaps there is a more complex, mature first lady about to move into the White House. There have been indications of that complexity before. When the interviewer in 1999 suggested that she might be with Trump for his money, noting that there weren’t too many 20-something supermodels on the arms of car mechanics, she responded with a rare flicker of depth. “You can’t sleep and you can’t hug with beautiful things, with a beautiful apartment, with a beautiful plane, beautiful cars, beautiful houses. You can’t do that. You can feel very empty… and if somebody said, ‘you know, you’re with a man because he’s rich and famous’, they don’t know me.”

And after all these years, we still don’t.

That Laura Loomer and Melania Trump should be two of the most important women in Trump’s orbit, though they have barely anything in common, is one of those odd realities of the Trump phenomenon. Each woman represents something essential about Trump’s 2024 campaign, and together they embody the past — and possible future — of his movement. While Laura is the keeper of the MAGA diehard flame, Melania is the inscrutable key to Trump’s life outside politics.

First, Loomer: the suspected source of Trump’s ludicrous “they’re eating the cats” claim during the recent presidential debate. The 31-year-old provocateur has made herself a crucial figure in Trumpworld to the chagrin of nearly everyone apart from Trump. She had travelled with Trump on his plane to the debate, and the following day was among his entourage to the 9/11 memorial for the yearly remembrance service despite being a 9/11 truther. The day before the debate, she had tweeted about the rumour regarding pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and so speculation soon began that she had helped plant the idea in Trump’s head.

Loomer is a quintessential MAGA character who gained notoriety for being shocking even by the far-Right’s standards. A self-proclaimed Islamophobe and “white advocate”, she’s been banned from nearly every social media platform for various bigoted remarks and provocations (though she’s been back on X since its sale to Elon Musk). In 2018, she chained herself to the Twitter headquarters in New York in 2018 in protest of her ban. She’s run for Congress in Florida twice; in 2020 she won the Republican primary in the district she was contesting.

“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post earlier this year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.” She had lost 25 pounds, she told the reporter, in an advance effort to look good for the communications job she hoped Trump would give her. She is the kind of wacky hanger-on that the pros around Trump have been trying to get rid of for years, never quite succeeding. While Trump’s top campaign officials reportedly blocked his effort to give Loomer a campaign job last year, they haven’t been able to keep her away from the man himself. Trump has always lacked quality control when it comes to his friends and advisers. He’ll listen to anyone who says the kind of things he likes to hear. And he seems to have no intention of distancing himself from Loomer even though almost-equally-hardcore MAGA luminaries including Marjorie Taylor Greene have condemned her. Trump told the press earlier this month that Loomer was a “free spirit” who he couldn’t control.

That Loomer could have inspired the massive flap about the Haitians in Ohio is of a piece with Trump’s long-standing modus operandi. He has always repeated half-baked rumours he hears about or sees on Fox News, no matter how sketchy the source is. The Loomer incident is a reminder of how close Trump remains to the milieu that gave him his political start and that he’ll never really abandon; in many ways, Loomer is the “ghost of Trump past”. Her brash world of Right-wing media injected Trump into the political conversation more than a decade ago, laying the groundwork for his 2016 campaign. Trump’s authenticity in this regard lies at the core of his political appeal. Unlike his rivals with their focus-grouped talking points and triangulated statements, Trump says what comes to mind, much like how his fans might act if they were in his position.

But this election has revealed the cracks in Trump’s say-anything approach. When Kamala Harris said in the debate that “bored and exhausted” supporters were leaving Trump’s rallies in droves this year, she had a point. There’s a tediousness to Trump’s rallies nowadays, and those rallies are taking place less frequently too. There’s something missing. Harris has reset the dynamic of the race; while before, polling showed Trump dispatching the feeble Joe Biden, now it shows a dead heat. Trump may really lose.

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From the opposite corner of Trumpworld, another of Trump’s key women has been piping up after a long silence. The ever-mysterious Melania had so far been a non-factor in this campaign, shunning the trail and maintaining her froideur even through the Republican National Convention, when the candidate’s spouse would normally speak. Melania had seemed happy to remain behind the scenes in this election in both word and deed.

This is now changing. Next month she’ll release a memoir, Melania, which she has been promoting in a series of videos on X. In one of these gauzy black-and-white clips, she speaks icily to the camera: “As a private person who has been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts.” In another, she described her past nude modelling work as part of the “timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression”.

But why is she speaking now? And will there be any juicy revelations in the memoir? Probably not, though her husband joked about it in a recent rally in New York state. “I hope she said good things about me”, he said, encouraging the crowd to buy the book, but “if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and say don’t buy it”. In all likelihood, Melania will say little directly about Trump at all. But her re-emergence in the waning days of the campaign is a reminder of the very real possibility that Trump will lose to Harris, freeing Melania from another term in DC. She’s perhaps the “ghost of Trump yet to come”. The memoir appears to be an effort to carve out her own space apart from Trump — or at least, maybe, prepare for a post-politics future. She’s selling a “collector’s edition” of the memoir for $250 on her website.

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Melania has always been something of an awkward figure in Trumpworld, the bombshell Slovenian model who found herself dragged to the White House to be First Lady of the United States. By all accounts she’s a genuinely shy person who would rather lead a quiet life tending to her son, Barron, who is now a student at New York University. She lingered at Trump Tower for months before moving to Washington after Trump won in 2016, and her efforts as First Lady were generally half-hearted, like her “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign. Apart from a few moments of defiance — most memorably, wearing a “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket to a migrant child detention centre — her aloof posture lasted throughout Trump’s term in office. But the occasional disclosures she has made have been intriguing. In a statement released after the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, Melania emphasised her husband as a person, not a political figure. “A monster who recognised my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” she wrote. “The core facets of my husband’s life — his human side — were buried below the political machine.” Though Melania has never seemed to like Donald much, she does know him in a way that few others can.

Trump told an interviewer on Sunday that he won’t run again in 2028 if he loses this election. It’s a rare and telling admission from a man who has spent four years fervently denying that he lost the last election. Sooner or later a post-Trump future looms in American politics, and the contrast between Melania and Laura illustrates the forked road Trump himself will face. On the one hand, becoming a martyr among the Loomers of the Right-wing media; on the other, retreating to his pre-presidential life as a golfing TV celebrity with a model wife.

The jacket, for instance. In June 2018, Melania was photographed departing a Texas Air Force base after visiting a shelter for detained immigrant children. She was wearing a jacket, olive green, with stark white letters on its back, a message that looked like it had been dabbed on with a child’s paintbrush: I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?

What did it mean? Everyone had a theory, including Donald Trump, who tweeted that the garment was meant as a message to the “Fake News Media” — even though many believed that it was a message to Trump himself. Still others, the harshest critics, insisted that she meant to convey her disregard for the children; one imagined her strolling through a crowd of traumatised migrant kids with I REALLY DON’T CARE emblazoned on her back. (Don’t worry, she didn’t.) Whoever the intended recipient of Melania’s disregard, everyone agreed that the jacket mattered.

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By the end of the week, the jacket — a flimsy, $39 piece of fast fashion from Zara that had probably been purchased by some trollish GOP stylist rather than the First Lady herself — had been imbued with as many layers of symbolic meaning as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Much less was made about the visit itself, despite its significance: Donald Trump signed an executive order to end his controversial family separations policy later that month, suggesting that Melania’s choice to involve herself in the issue was not just out of character but perhaps even influential.

But the jacket controversy was only a continuation of a well-established pattern. By the time the 45th president took office, we were already used to filling in the blanks where Melania might have been, but wasn’t. There was no place on Donald Trump’s campaign trail for a perpetually-present spouse, even if she’d wanted to be there; the thrice-married and notoriously philandering candidate made no pretence of being a paterfamilias in the tradition of family values Republicans.

When he did bring family onstage, it made for a striking portrait: Melania on one side, a passel of large adult children from his previous marriages on the other. And unlike other political wives, Melania’s appearances were sparing and strategic: popping up to dismiss Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” tape as “boy’s talk,” or delivering a rare 11th hour rally speech in PA (where her husband did in fact secure a surprise win.)

These appearances held all the more impact for how rare they were. Mostly, Melania was a non-entity, an inscrutable sphinx whose expressionless face betrayed nothing at all. The mystery was part of the allure, on both sides. For Trump’s supporters, Melania was part of the package that made him not just electable but aspirational: a gorgeous, glamorous, much-younger model, as much a symbol of his success as his solid gold bathroom appliances or luxury real estate portfolio.

But for his opponents, she was an intriguing cipher. There was her absence from the campaign trail and her apparent lack of interest in public life. There was the photo of her from election night — unsmiling, eyes closed in either an inopportune blink or a silent plea for strength — at the moment where Trump pulled ahead in the polls.

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There was the infamous moment at the Inauguration, a smile that flashed onto her face and then vanished the moment her husband stopped looking. The moment became a gif, and the Left became briefly obsessed with the notion that she was secretly One Of Us. #FreeMelania trended. Offers of salvation were extended. An article at the Atlantic explained that Melania’s fleeting smile spoke to something bigger: “The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth — about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us.”

When Melania remained in New York for months after Trump transitioned to life in the White House, speculation abounded that she was planning a divorce. Clearly, she wanted out; clearly, she hated him as much as we did. Armchair body language experts noted her obvious disdain for her husband. Armchair conspiracy theorists speculated that she’d simply opted out of the First Lady thing entirely, hiring a series of doppelgängers to take her place.

Of course, if people had given even half as much credence to the thoughts and feelings of Real Melania as to the fantasy Resistance Melania who lived in their imaginations, they would’ve realised their error. Long before she became the first lady, she made it clear that she wanted no sympathy: “People, they don’t really know me, people think and talk about me, like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania,'” she said. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

That was October 2016.

By the time Trump had finished out his first year in office, the pity had evaporated — and evolved. Where Melania’s silence once seemed full of intriguing possibilities, now it became intolerable. Without any actual statements to parse, and with her public initiatives limited to a short-lived (and widely mocked) “Be Best” campaign against cyberbullying, we were forced to scrutinise her non-verbal forms of expression in search of secret messages, which is to say, we had to trash her outfits.

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That jacket was only the beginning; just a few months later, a weeklong tour of Africa culminated in countless headlines about Melania’s hats. Especially problematic was a getup that looked a little bit like the character Rene Belloq’s, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Had Melania intentionally copied her outfit from a fictional Nazi in a movie from 1981? Had she ever even seen Raiders? Who knows? Who cares? What was important was that she did not explicitly deny it, and therefore, one could only assume the worst. As Allure noted, all this nonsense could’ve been avoided: if she’d just gone hatless, she “might not have caused the Internet to call her out for looking like a First Lady-shaped dog whistle.”

That’s right: Caused. Look what you made us do, Melania!

And in our minds, the First Lady’s transformation was complete. Before the reality of President Trump set in, she represented a sort of dark hope: a secret sympathiser, a saboteur, a Judith hidden in plain sight inside Trump’s political tent. But as denial gave way to disillusionment, and Trump himself proved not just uncontrollable but impervious to shame, criticisms of his presidency began to heap on the shoulders of his seeming enablers.

Melania’s lack of public presence started to look like not just complicity, but something more insidious, a pretence of powerlessness when she really had her hands on the levers. The one thing we know for certain about Melania is that she’s one of the few people whose opinion Trump cares about — so why wasn’t she leveraging that influence for good? Why couldn’t she just, like, do something about him?

When did we stop feeling sorry for Melania, and start to hate her instead? Why did she stop being a vehicle for the hopes of a fiery resistance, and start becoming guilty by association? Whatever the reason, it certainly wasn’t anything she did, because what Melania did was what she’d always done: nothing. Her presence in Trump’s re-election campaign, as in his White House, has been as sparse as ever. Even the inevitable book from a former advisor, Melania and Me, was less a blockbuster tell-all than a confirmation of what we already knew: that she never really wanted to be here.

And where her husband, facing likely defeat, seems determined to leave kicking and screaming, Melania’s impact will be most remarkable in its nonexistence. A stiletto heel print in an East Wing carpet here, a half-hearted rose garden renovation there: the leave-no-trace First Lady. We hardly knew her, and now, we never will. She’ll cross the threshold of the White House, get into the limo, and disappear — into the luxurious, comfortable, and above all, private life that was all she ever wanted. As for the rest of it, she just really didn’t care. Did you?

This book tells the story of this family’s shocking, though still prosaic, cruelty: it is a truism that true horror is domestic. Much will be written about the men — though the women, and certainly the author, are no less interesting for their collusion.

There is her grandfather, Fred Snr, who she calls a sociopath; and her father, Fred Jnr, the oldest son. He was destroyed by his father’s expectations and died of alcoholism at 42. Then there is Donald: “Fred’s monster – the only child of his who mattered to him – [who] would ultimately be rendered unlovable by the very nature of Fred’s preference for him”.

Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist; perhaps she became one to understand her family and herself. She could be silent when Donald was only a Reality TV star and a bankrupt property developer, but now he is President, “I can’t let him destroy my country.” The personal and the patriotic collide in this book, though it will do no good. I doubt Trump fans will read it; and they know what Donald is. They like him anyway.

Mary Trump believes Donald meets all the nine criteria for narcissism, and possibly has antisocial personality disorder and an undiagnosed learning disability “that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information”. His mental illness – his condition – begins and ends with Fred Snr, a man I believe hated all his five children: except Donald the braggart, who mirrored Fred Snr’s spite back at him, and so was loved. Donald would not go the way of his sensitive older brother Fred Jnr, so he became “the killer” his father required. I understand him now, due to Mary Trump: a man who lies always is telling a kind of truth.

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“Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous,” Mary Trump writes, “you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy. At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father.” This is not that unusual for male politicians. I sense a similar yearning in Boris Johnson for the approval of the appalling Stanley.

Donald was, of course, an abandoned child; and the abandoned child finds it hard to grow up. If his father was a monster dedicated — obliviously — to the destruction of his children’s self-worth, his mother was a ghost. The Trump women inhabit this book dimly. Mary (or “Gam” to her granddaughter and namesake) collapsed with “serious post-partum complications” after the birth of her youngest child Robert. Bearing her husband’s dynasty destroyed her health. The (probably unnecessary) removal of her ovaries caused osteoporosis, and she was in agony for the rest of her life. This was Donald’s first abandonment: by his mother to a series of hospital stays, and her own private anguish. He was two years old.

Mary was, her grand-daughter writes, “unstable and needy, prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom”. And so, “when it came to her sons, she acted as if there were nothing she could do for them”. She became “a bystander” in a family “split deeply along gender lines”. She was “depleted”. As they grew, her younger sons Donald and Robert repaid her with contempt. She made roast beef at Christmas, and they wanted roast turkey. They harangued her, and “Gam spent the whole meal with her head bowed”.

One Thanksgiving, she choked on the meal. “You okay, Mum?” Fred Jr — the sensitive, the alcoholic — asked. “As she continued to struggle, a couple of people at the other end of the table looked up to see what was going on but then looked down at their plates and continued eating”. Fred Jnr took her out to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. “When they returned, there was a desultory round of applause. ‘Good job, Freddy,’ Rob said, as if my father had just killed a mosquito.”

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Fred Snr’s cruelty was extraordinary. He employed Fred Jnr but gave him no responsibility; when he became an airline pilot instead, he belittled him. Fred Jnr’s sister Maryanne was “a smart, ambitious girl in a misogynistic family. She was the eldest child, but because she was a girl, Freddy, the eldest boy, got all of her father’s attention. She was left to align herself with her mother, who had no power in the house. Ultimately, she did what she was supposed to do because she thought her father cared.” He didn’t; rather he kept her in poverty, though he was already a millionaire, and he helped to destroy her marriage.

Maryanne married David Desmond, who was soon unemployed. Despite a trust fund from her grandparents — the family wealth was founded on prostitution, and this is apt too — she survived on Crisco cans filled with coins from the washers in Trump buildings. Her mother gave them to her for ‘laundry’. It was called ‘laundry’ because Fred Snr’s cruelty could not be openly acknowledged. He gave his children nothing from the trusts, which he administered; and he went through all the cheque stubs. His daughter lived on coins. “Without them she [Maryanne] wouldn’t have been able to feed herself or her son, David, Jr”. Later she hinted to her father that her husband would appreciate a job. He gave him one: as a parking attendant. Even so Maryanne told her niece: “I never challenged my father ever.” There was no point.

The family was similarly cruel to Mary Trump’s mother Linda Clapp. The family could not blame themselves for Fred Jr’s death, even as they had seen such petty cruelties as his father refusing both to mend his son’s uninhabitable flat — which Fred Snr owned — and intervening to prevent his getting a mortgage when he tried to move instead. He could not be allowed to be free. When Fred Jnr died his children were disinherited: death is a failure in this family, and failure must be punished. (They challenged the will in court and received an undisclosed amount.) Not one member of his family was at Fred Jnr’s bedside when he died. Donald was at the movies. Instead, they blamed Linda for his death. Donald later told Mary: “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother.”

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Trump women survive with silence and collusion. Ivanka appears as a child climbing on her father for kisses. Mary Trump remembers her uncle Robert — a mini-Donald — saying Melania, Donald’s wife, barely spoke. Perhaps, Mary Trump suggested, her English wasn’t good? “No,” Robert replied, “She knows what’s she there for.”

Mary Trump was likewise silent; until she decided to speak.  She told her grandfather she wanted to return to school after a year out. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Just go to trade school and become a receptionist”. She replied: “I want to get my degree.” Fred Snr replied, in language he bequeathed to his son: “that’s nasty”. She never told her family she is gay. She did not tell them she was getting married. Donald hired her to write a book and failed to pay her. She grew up to be a watcher, and superficially pliant.

She says her uncles always called her “honey bunch”. “I sometimes wondered,” she writes, “if either of my uncles actually knew my name.”

She is suffocated by that name. Staying in a Trump hotel she writes: “my name was plastered everywhere on everything: TRUMP shampoo, TRUMP conditioner, TRUMP slippers, TRUMP shower cap, TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit and TRUMP bathrobe. I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure centre of my Trump brain”.

I wonder if being disinherited from a great fortune saved Mary Trump; if you don’t get the fortune, you don’t have to collude anymore; and now she can honour her father. I also wonder if, with the publication of this book, her grandfather Fred Snr would be pleased with her at last. On publication day she sold almost 1 million copies. Would his cynicism extend that far? I think it would. She proved herself — and I write this smiling — a killer too.