After the attack, the former first lady has reconnected with her husband with a message of support. And she will be at his side for the third nomination
Former first lady Melania Trump is expected to attend the Republican National Convention on Thursday, July 17, when Trump will formally accept the presidential nomination: a senior Trump campaign official told NBC News. However, it is not excluded that she could appear earlier. For the former first lady, this is the third time she has attended a Republican convention alongside her husband in his acceptance speech for the nomination, after 2016 and 2020.
Already at the end of Trump's presidency, since 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, the relationship between the two has cooled for some time, to an unofficial but de facto separation. The attack on her husband and her candidacy could perhaps have changed things in the last few hours.
Last March, Melania had preferred not to answer the media who asked her if she would campaign for her husband. In April, she had never been seen next to her husband in court at the hearings at the federal court in New York that led to the tycoon's conviction in the Stormy Daniels case. Melania was always silent, always one step behind her husband.
So much so that the New York Post, a conservative newspaper, ran a headline after the first day of the GOP convention "Where is Melania?" to underline the former first lady's absence from Donald Trump's inaugural speech, the former president's first public appearance after the attempted assassination last Saturday.
Trump, with a conspicuous band-aid on his injured ear, entered the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on Monday evening, in front of delirious supporters who applauded and chanted "fight," the word that Trump chanted several times as he was carried off the stage with a bloody face, amid applause and enthusiastic greetings from supporters, accompanied, among others, by his children Donald Jr., Eric and Tiffany.
A context in which the absence of Melania and her son Barron, the tycoon's youngest 18-year-old child, was therefore highlighted. In fact, their daughter Ivanka was also absent, who, after having had a leading role with her husband Jared Kusher in her father's first administration, took a clear step back from politics since leaving the White House in 2021.
Melania is not included in the program of speeches at the convention, even if Trump's staff assures that she will participate in the event that will end on Thursday. In any case, the fact that a speech from her was not scheduled constitutes a break with the decade-old tradition that wants the wives of Republican candidates for the White House to speak at the convention.
Former Slovenian model Melania Knavs, born in 1970, married Trump for the third time in 2005, and continued this tradition at 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 participating in any political event, without presiding over any of her husband's rallies.
Her absence on the first night of the Republican Convention was particularly striking because last Sunday, a few hours after her husband's attempted assassination, Melania had released a rare and heartfelt statement in which she urged people to "remember that every politician is a man and a woman with a family who loves them." She also said that seeing the images of the shooting made her realize 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 wish" that from what happened to Butler something new can be reborn for the United States: "A new dawn has arrived," she writes. And then she speaks of respect, family and love four times. As if to say, that the role of first lady candidate in view of the elections would have already been redefined differently following Saturday's attack.
