Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada on the Empty Propaganda of ‘Melania’

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:17I'm Nadja Spiegelman, an editor at New York Times Opinion. Over the weekend, I watched Melania in a nearly empty Manhattan theater. All of my friends refused to see it with me. Luckily, I now get the chance to discuss it with two distinguished columnists, Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada. Thank you both so much for being here. Thank you, Nadja. Great to be here, Nadja. Let's do some movie reviews. Yes. I mean, let's start by talking about how for journalists in left-leaning cities, you're both in D.C., there's a lot of joking around about what the experience of going to the movie theater to see this film is like.

0:57For example, audio producer Derek Arthur and I had only one other person in the theater, a young woman who told us after that she had come because she'd seen ads for this film in the subway and been curious about what it was about. What was your experience of going to see the film in theaters? It was so funny because I went in downtown Washington, and there were only a few people there. They were all journalists. So finally, one of the journalists, this guy stands up in the back of the theater and goes, are there any civilians here? I wanted to interview someone. And one journalist tapped me on the shoulder, Betsy Kline of CNN, and she's like, can I talk to you about the movie after?

1:43And I went, no. And she looked shocked. And I said, no, because I'm a journalist, Betsy. You know, so it was, you know, it was just very incestuous with just a few journalists. Although I did bring my Trump voting Republican sister, which was very revealing because that way I knew that there was a group of older white women who were going to love this movie. And Carlos, what was your movie going experience? So I went to see Melania twice, actually, over the weekend, because that's how committed I am to the New York Times. The first time was the same showing as Maureen. Basically, I think we found the earliest possible showing on Friday in D.C.

2:33and, you know, it was people from all walks of life, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic, CNN, you know? So literally like I'm standing in the concession line and there's a journalist in front of me and a journalist behind me. The second time I saw it was on Sunday and it was not in DC. I went out to see it in one of the malls in the DC suburbs of Maryland, figuring, you know, it would be a different kind of crowd. And it was very much civilians this time, right? It was an older crowd, much more female, no one carrying notebooks. And people seemed to be enjoying themselves.

3:12And there were certainly more people than had been there that first time that I saw it. So there's certainly an audience for the movie. I'm curious what you thought about Melania before going into the film and what you thought about her after walking out of the film. Was there anything that changed through seeing this film? Well, it's interesting because I went on Trump's first presidential exploratory trip to make a speech in Miami to Cuban Americans. It was 1999. And Melania, who was then Melania Knauss, was there. And she was his girlfriend. And I liked her. I thought she was cool. And there was much more of a sense that she was in on the joke.

3:57She was laughing about how they had outfitted her and Calvin Klein to look like a politician's girlfriend. And that she'd never worn skirts that long. But she wasn't going to give up her stilettos. I mean, there was a more sly sense. And that was totally absent in this film. That's so interesting. I mean, I think we all have this fantasy that there's something about Melania that could be a secret, because she's such a cipher, that could, like, be a secret resistance, a sort of an immigrant who's a bomb waiting to go off as a resistant. And I think liberals have always fantasized about that. But I always thought that was silly.

4:40Remember, they thought maybe she would go to, like, the women's resistance marches and go in disguise in a pink pussy hat. And, you know, that was just wishful thinking on the part of liberals. She is very, whatever her relationship with Trump is, whatever their deal is, she is very comfortable in this vertical solitude of the gilded world that he has set her in. Vertical solitude of a gilded world is like all adjectives that really describe this film. Yeah, this is like a bad episode of The Gilded Age. Totally. Without Christine Baranski, unfortunately. Before we go further, for anyone who's managed to somehow avoid what this movie is, Carlos, can you give us a synopsis?

5:32What is this movie? So it covers the final 20 days before President Trump's inauguration last year, right? So like early January of 2025. And it mainly focuses on Melania's preparation for the official events that surround the inauguration, the swearing-in ceremony itself, the inaugural balls. So, you know, she meets with her designer, with event planners, with security personnel, you know. They throw in a few kind of heavily scripted meetings with like Brigitte Macron of France and Queen Rania of Jordan. And she's flying a lot. She's flying back and forth between Mar-a-Lago and Washington and New York.

6:16So a lot of this movie is Melania in cars, in planes, always in heels. And really, the bookends are kind of perfect because it starts with her traveling to meet Hervé Pierre, her clothing designer. And then it ends with her in a photo shoot at the White House where Pierre is like hovering around her, adjusting her clothes. At one point, she says in the movie that she wants to change the role of First Lady. so it's not just about official duties, but the whole movie is about her official duties. It was weird to me that they picked those 20 days. Like, I don't know, like a more natural period would have been from election night, say, to inauguration day.

6:56There's never an explanation for why this period mattered. So that's it, that's it. It's literally 20 days into the life of Melania, but a very curated life, right? You never see her really talking to, say, Baron. You never see her son. You never see her talking to a friend. You know, it's a kind of a lonely existence, but yet one that she seems to enjoy. Yeah, you touched on so many important points that I think we're going to have to go circle back to one by one to tease out even further. I agree that there's a voiceover at the beginning where she's like, everybody's been wondering. So here it is, the 20 days leading up to the inauguration.

7:38And it's like, that is not what everybody has been wondering about. And it's so curious that they choose this as a narrative structure. And to continue giving some of the context sort of around the film, Maureen, can you fill us in just a little bit on the role that Amazon plays in the making of this movie? Right. Well, Amazon gave$40 million to make the movie and another$35 million to promote it. And out of that, Melania pockets$28 million. And so, obviously, that is just a way for Jeff Bezos to curry favor. And there's this hilarious scene in the movie where they're having a night before the inaugural dinner at the National Building Museum, and she has this pay-on to how great their donors are.

8:31And they pan past Bezos and Lawrence Sanchez and all the other lords of the cloud who have bought American government in this blatant way. I mean, it's so heavy handed. Yeah, so heavy handed. But there's no subtlety in that. Yeah. No. And again, so in some ways, Melania and Trump are well matched because neither of them have met an amalement that they didn't like. I mean, for that reason, for the reason that it's like intentionally sponsored and bought, and for many others, a lot of people are referring to this film as a piece of propaganda. But one of the definitions of propaganda is that it has an intention to promote a worldview or belief.

9:17So what is this film promoting? You know, it's interesting because Donald Trump is the master of creating a different false reality. And he's done that with the election for his fans, you know, that he claims was stolen from him. He's done it with January 6th. And so this is Melania's version of that. In her world, Donald Trump is a unifier and promotes dignity and compassion. And, you know, it's mostly her getting in and out of cars while in the split screen of the real world, we're seeing ICE agents shoot people in the face in their cars. So it's absurd propaganda the way his is. Yeah. Carlos, what do you think?

10:08What is the film trying to promote from a propaganda perspective? Yeah. I mean, first thing I'll say is that we often speak of propaganda sort of in a pejorative sense. I find propaganda to be utterly fascinating and incredibly useful to understand politicians, whether it's political memoirs, you know, or movies like these where the subject of the film, you know, had a lot of control in how she's presented. Propaganda tells you two things. It tells you how people wish to be perceived. And it tells you what they think of us, what they think of the audience, you know, what's going to appeal to us.

10:45And so in that sense, it's a great mirror too. I mean, I think that in a sense they try to sort of soften this administration a little bit to, you know, glamorize it, humanize it, to sort of give you just a very different sense of what it's about. Melania speaks in these almost like chat GPT generated voiceovers, you know, that are just very. I was also thinking chat GPT. Yeah. She really, it's that like really flattened AI voice. But also like the words that she chooses, right? Like she says stuff like, you know, every day I live with purpose and devotion, orchestrating the complexities of my life while nurturing my family's needs.

11:27Right. Like, I don't know what that means. Right. I don't know what that, that doesn't tell you anything. Right. Or like there's a moment when they're at this congressional luncheon after the inauguration. And she just says, you know, as first lady, I constantly think about how our lawmakers can build dignity, create equal opportunity and foster compassion through the unity of all Americans. Right. Like these are just generic, empty political words. Right. That don't that don't mean anything. You know, but when she mentions unity, like I want to follow up on Maureen's point. There's a great moment in this movie where Donald Trump is rehearsing for his inaugural address and Melania's sitting in on it.

12:08And one thing he's saying is that I want my legacy to be that of a peacemaker. And Melania pipes up in that moment and says, peacemaker and unifier, right? And Trump didn't like that. He turns to the camera and says, don't put that in the movie, right? You know, don't keep that in the movie. and she says, no, please keep it. So it's almost, it's not that he doesn't want to say he's a unifier because he ends up saying it in the address. It's that he doesn't want it to be seen that she's telling him what to say. Yeah. And I thought that was like, that was a really interesting little moment in the movie.

12:47But like, I don't know on what planet Donald Trump is a unifier. He's many things, but for her, it's just important, not that he be it, it's important that he say it. In that sense, they're very well matched because they both feel that sort of the power of repetition, simply saying something will make it seem truer than it is. But also, Carlos, this moment that you point out where that moment is preceded by Melania sort of mischievously beckoning at the camera to come into a room that wasn't previously planned to be filmed in where Trump is rehearsing his inauguration speech really stands out because it's one of the only minutes of footage in this film that doesn't feel perfectly preplanned and pre-scripted.

13:27And also one of the few moments where you actually see Melania interacting with people who are not her staff, who are like preparing her clothes, her invitations. I'm really curious about, because we're talking about it as propaganda, Melania herself produced this film. These are all very intentional choices that are made. And Maureen, you mentioned earlier loneliness. I mean, you see Melania in this really lonely world. I think for the first several minutes of the film, the only things that she says is just thank you to various staff members and hello. Yeah. And her personal Instagram was that way, too.

14:06Just I don't think she seems lonely. She seems alone, you know, to prefer not to have these. That's a good distinction. If anyone else would have had their friends in a document, you know, a documentary, they would have had some friends to show they had friends. But, you know, you asked before what I thought differently of her after the movie, and I wanted to tell you. So my late friend, Andre Leontali, who was a Vogue editor, styled Melania for her Vogue cover when she married Trump, and he traveled to Paris with her and went to Couturiers. and he told me a few things about her, which was that she was very polite to the couturiers and he saw her in the all together and he said she was the best moisturized woman he had ever seen.

14:58And as we can see in the movie, because Brett Ratner has a bit of a foot fetish, she walks on five inch stilettos better than any woman in history. And that she was a great mom. And all of those things you also can tell in the movie, I think. And so what Andre told me long ago about her has not changed. It's true that there's so much of her feet. There's so many stiletto shots. Well, the first shot is like the... Yeah, the first thing you see of her is her feet. Yeah, you picture her having feet like Barbie that don't go flat. Totally. And you almost... I think there's only one shot where her shoes come off.

15:41at the very end of her whole day of inauguration where she's been walking. But then she doesn't say, wow, it's hard to do this or this is how I do this. You know, you don't get any insight into this amazing feat of being on these skyscraper heels because normally at that age, women are downgrading to flats or two-inch heels. But no. Yeah, Maureen, you also are someone who wears a lot of heels. What is the like meaning and experience of wearing heels like this? Yeah, I wore heels through like eight presidential campaigns, and it's hard. And at some point, it hurts too much to keep doing it. But she has a steely resolve about it.

16:24I would have loved to hear her secrets on that. But even on small superficial things like that, we didn't get any insights. Yeah. My dad was a police detective in D.C., was in charge of Senate security for 20 years. And he wouldn't get my sister a job at the Capitol because he said walking on those marble floors was so painful you would get varicose veins. And my sister and I were wincing on her long walks on those marble floors because it had to hurt, but only glancing reference to that. I hadn't even thought about how painful it must be to walk in six-inch gilettos on marble floors. I mean, also, all credit to Nancy Pelosi, who also did it.

17:07It was almost distracting how often the focus was on the feet. Well, she may also be rebuking all of the women in Trump's world who have Mar-a-Lago face, who have done too much work. Because obviously there's a lot of work that's been done, but she's managed to remain exquisite looking. Yeah, she does look really beautiful. I think you say this near peace, Maureen, that Ivanka's nickname for Melania. Nickname was, yeah. She called Melania the portrait and Melania called her the princess. And you could have really called this documentary the portrait because that's what it's like. It's like a static kind of portrait of a beautiful woman.

17:53Let's talk about the other choices in the film. There's a lot of choices this film makes. One of them is with the music that it chooses. And the music does a lot of work because it's mostly shots. Lots of shots of her legs. Car parades and walking down hallways with a lot of scoring. Carlos, what do you make of the scoring? There's a moment when she's being driven to the airport in New York or something. She's going back to Florida, I think. And she's asked sort of like, you know, hey, who's your favorite recording artist? What's your favorite song? And she's like, oh, I love Michael Jackson, Billie Jean, right?

18:30And so they start playing Billie Jean and they start doing almost this like, you know, carpool karaoke with Melania in the car. And she's sort of like bopping along to Billie Jean, seems to really like it, knows all the words to the song. And yet you don't hear her. You barely hear her singing because the other person in the car is singing and they just don't make her audible at all. So you see that she's mouthing along to Billie Jean, right? But you don't really hear Melania's voice. But Carlos, Carlos, didn't you think it? I thought it was so funny that. But so she brings Brett Ratner out of exile.

19:04I mean, he was exiled from Hollywood for sexual transgressions. And she brings him out of exile to be the director of this movie. And then he asks who her favorite artist is, and it's Michael Jackson. So, and in the midst of the Epstein files of tales of pedophilia, you know, it's just kind of, are we not going to have one minute without a predator? being mentioned here or directing the movie. So it was kind of creepy, I thought. You know, one funny, this isn't about music, but for me, my favorite line of everything, I don't know if it started with Sophie Gilbert or on Twitter or whatever, was the idea that her inaugural dress, it's impossible to look at it now without thinking it looks like the redacted Epstein files, the black.

19:56I hadn't heard that. I'm crossing things out. That was Sophie Gilbert, I think, in her piece in The Atlantic about it. Yeah, I thought that was a great line. Oh, it's so funny. Maureen, you were talking about Brett Ratner earlier. Right. And you can say a lot of things about him. But one thing about him is that he knows how to tell a story. He does know, he does understand narrative. And one really notable thing about this film is how boring it is. The only setup for narrative tension is whether that the hem of her dress will be perfect by the time inauguration happens. And even that setup, which is the setup of so many reality wedding shows of like, will the invitations be printed on time, gives us no narrative tension.

20:42We're certain that they will. Everything goes right. Nothing ever goes wrong. What do you make of that choice of creating a film that has absolutely no narrative tension? Yeah, it's only revealing for what it doesn't reveal. I mean, I just think he got his order straight, which is she wanted to look gorgeous in every frame and not reveal anything. And that's what happened. I will point out a couple of moments of not sort of narrative tension, but at least like a little bit of a moment when the veil drops slightly, right? And that is during the discussion that Donald and Melania Trump are having with the sort of events coordinator and the Secret Service director about security surrounding the inauguration.

21:33And you see how Melania is skeptical of the security arrangements. And obviously, it was in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on her husband, right? And so, you know, she says that, oh, like, is there a place where we're supposed to get out of the car, you know, and walk? I don't want to do that. Baron doesn't want to do that. You know, how could that be safe? And she says, especially with the last year, right? Right. And and, you know, and then the the Secret Service guys are like, you know, let's talk about this off camera. Right. So that was a little moment that to me was interesting.

22:12It was a little tiny glimpse into what she's thinking. Right. What's going on in her head? She was afraid of leaving the car. Yeah. She was afraid of leaving the car. And clearly Baron was as well. And so, you know, that was like I appreciated that moment in the movie because it felt slightly real. Yeah, Melania's worries about security and that I think brings us into talking about the larger political context into which this film lands. Maureen, you had started by talking a bit about sort of that juxtaposition between being afraid to get out of the car and what's happening to people around the country being pulled out of their cars by ICE officers.

22:49Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, I mean, America, my dad was born in Ireland. America is a nation of immigrants. And we're at this horrible moment where immigrants are facing kind of these ice thugs. And I say that, you know, my dad was a policeman. So I understand the difficulties. And my dad had this, you get to that moment where you have to decide, are you going to shoot someone? or how are you going to handle this situation? It's a split-second decision. But even so, you know, their behavior, they're so untrained and so reckless, and it makes all police look bad. And so we're at this moment where immigrants are getting dragged out of Home Depots and their own homes.

23:39And here is Melania, the only immigrant Trump likes, in her satin line cage. And it's an incredibly unpleasant juxtaposition. Like, yes, he would bring her parents here as chain migration, you know, but all other immigrants are suspect, unless I guess they're from white European countries. You know, his attitude to immigrants is gross. Gross seems unfortunately even like an understatement. Although there is an interesting shot in the film where he and Melania are posing with the entire Mar-a-Lago staff, many of whom I would assume are also themselves immigrants, it's impossible to tell Melania's story without some version of an immigrant journey.

24:28There's a person in the documentary who is from Laos, and she talks about it being the culmination of the American dream for her to be doing the interior decoration of the White House, given that she had come to America at a young age. And it's so curious to be still peddling this idea of the immigrant American dream in the context of what Trump is doing vis-a-vis immigration. Carlos, how does all this strike you? Yeah, well, I hate beginning sentences with as a, you know, so I won't say as an immigrant, but I'm a naturalized American citizen born in Peru. And I was kind of waiting to see if she would say something about this, right?

25:15Because that moment that you mentioned with the with the decorator for the White House is very early on in the movie. And later on, you know, she says, again, it's one of these sort of chat GPT sort of generic political speak things you're supposed to say, right? Where Melania says, I have the line here, walking into the Capitol's rotunda, I felt the weight of history intertwined with my own journey as an immigrant, a reminder of why I respect this nation so deeply. Everyone should do what they can to protect your individual rights, never take them for granted, because in the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.

25:50Right. It's that's that's that's lovely. That's great. It's also entirely decontextualized from the campaign her husband had just waged to win the election, a campaign that was based on the promise of mass deportations against those people who are poisoning the blood of the country, as Trump put it often. Now, in her book, her memoir, which came out also titled Melania, in a fit of originality, she talks about how she urged Trump to end the family separation policy at the southern border during the first term. This book came out in 2024. right but here there's absolutely no sense at all that she spoke to him about any of this right or that she's aware or cares that the rhetoric that she's giving in this movie doesn't match up at all against what he's actually doing instead she calls him a unifier now i wouldn't expect this movie to be a full-throated critique of the trump administration like that's that's absurd right You have to sort of let things slide when it's the first lady, right?

26:56But it's also kind of fascinating that some of those generic statements she has are so contrary to sort of some basic things that this administration is doing. In what way does this film manage to humanize Melania, if at all? Does it humanize her at all, Maureen, and in what way? Um, no, I would say my experience of it was the reverse, because having met her at the beginning when she and Trump were just dating, you know, I have had a sense of her all this time that she was slyer. And again, as I said, in on the joke a little bit more and would be really fascinating to talk to. And now I don't feel that way.

27:43Yeah. I mean, but the film somehow made$7 million in its first weekend, which is the best opening weekend for a documentary in years. So I do think a lot of normal people like Melania and think she's, you know, stunning and want to see the behind the scenes thing. But it doesn't really matter how much the movie makes. The point is, she got a$28 million bribe from Bezos, who does a lot of business with the government with his Blue Origin, you know, spaceships and all his companies. And it's gross. Oh, yeah. And it's a simple, even if it is able to make$7 million in its first weekend, it is never going to recoup the$75 million that Amazon spent on the rights and promotion of this film.

28:40There's no way to even think about it. That isn't the point. Yeah, it's not the point. It's certainly not the point. Yeah. I mean, I'm hearing from people who like this movie, right? Like, I wrote a column, you know, this week, somewhat critical of the movie. and one of my earliest emails is a guy named Phil telling me, Carlos, saw the movie and loved it. I did have a question. Who are you and why would I care about anything you have to say? Sincerely, Phil, right? So like, you know, I'm reminded of a statement that Michael Jordan, the basketball god, the goat, made years ago when he was being pressured to support a political candidate, a Democrat in North Carolina, in his home state.