Melania Trump is secretly miserable as first lady, a new report claims.
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Private, self-conscious, and smarting from some harsh, even mocking press, Melania is “struggling with the realities of her new role and the scrutiny that comes with it,” US Weekly says in its Feb. 27 cover story, citing family sources.
“This life wasn’t her dream. It was Donald’s,” a Trump family friend, stylist Phillip Bloch, told the magazine.
“Truthfully, it’s a lot to cope with.”
Since Inauguration Day, Melania has spent almost all her time hiding inside the “gilded cage” of the family’s lavish, $100 million Trump Tower penthouse on Fifth Avenue — where treasured son Barron, 10, has a whole floor to himself. Recently, the White House team begged her to come to Washington and give her husband a PR boost by presiding over the traditional first lady tours at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — and posing for press photos, sources told US.
“She was told, ‘All you need to do is show up on one day and take photos,’” one family source said. Melania declined.
Melania couldn’t even be cajoled into accompanying the Japanese prime minister’s wife, Akie Abe, on the traditionally first lady-hosted Capitol tour for spouses of visiting dignitaries.
Negative scrutiny from late-night hosts — Jimmy Kimmel quipped last week that she’s “trapped like Rapunzel” in Trump Tower — and from her libel suit against the UK’s Daily Mail have not helped.
In the much-covered lawsuit, Melania sued the Mail for implying she'd once worked as a high-end escort, an implication that the newspaper later retracted.
Celebrities and fashion designers, critical of her husband’s policies, have publicly shunned the Trumps, another blow.